


Sealed With a Kiss

by follow_the_sun, littleblackfox



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Alternate Universe - Fae, Alternate Universe - Magic, Asexual Character, Asexuality Spectrum, Awkward Asexual Seduction, CAbigbang2018, Captain America Big Bang 2018, Demisexual Steve Rogers, Fae & Fairies, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Protective Bucky Barnes, Selkie Bucky Barnes, controlling parents, genderqueer!Loki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-13 08:09:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 64,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16013840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun, https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblackfox/pseuds/littleblackfox
Summary: Steve shook his head in disbelief. “So just because I knocked your coat on the floor and handed it back to you, now we both have to be legally married to a stranger forever?”“Well,” Bucky said, eyeing the ring box on the coffee table, “we don’t have to be strangers.”Bucky's a selkie. Steve's a clumsy human. They're married now. Oops.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to my collab with [phenomenal artist (and also phenomenal writer) littleblackfox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblackfox/) for the 2018 Cap Big Bang! It's based on [this Tumblr prompt](http://kurara-black-blog.tumblr.com/post/170166549083/howtobangyourmonster-oops-dropped-your-coat), and it was supposed to be a SMALL love story, but it ended up being the thing where I dumped my heart out on paper, so Steve is not the only one experiencing a feeling of "oops."
> 
> And seriously, go check out [littleblackfox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleblackfox/)'s other work. This art is perfect, and makes me so happy that I've been staring at it for days.
> 
> Additional acknowledgments:  
> To [beradan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beradan/) for invaluable research assistance and well-deserved stern looks.  
> To [robyngoodfellow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/robyngoodfellow/) for letting me yell about plot and character ideas at all hours.  
> To [wrenlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wrenlet/) for assistance in the form of a comfy chair, coffee, and exhortations to "embrace the idea of a sequel" when I wandered into a landmine of plot.  
> To various fae encountered and/or fictionalized during this writing: I appreciate your not transforming me into an equal volume of spiders.  
> Also, [here's a Spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/h2zsf33h0oqz79oihaig099ee/playlist/1fcPdV1yBTr7MYo6GVRgBK?si=NzVAb84pQGykzHqqguGBaQ) for this fic, because why not?

If Steve Rogers lived to be a hundred, he was never going to figure out how he’d gotten such bad luck. His full-blooded Irish mother had lamented on more than one occasion that she must have pissed off a fairy while pregnant to get such an impossible, intractable child; an army of schoolteachers, principals, and priests had declared him a born troublemaker; and his best friend, Peggy, who probably knew him better than anybody in the world, was fond of telling Steve that the problem was quite simply a case of terminal stubbornness. But this time, the problem had a name, and that name was Natasha Romanoff.

All right, so part of the blame was on him. After all, it wasn’t like he didn’t _know_ that Natasha had, for unknown reasons, taken it upon herself to get him laid. She’d been working on it for almost a year now, a year during which he’d agreed to almost a dozen blind dates just to get her off his case, dates that for some reason always involved tall, generically attractive women he had absolutely nothing in common with. After one particularly bad night, when the poor girl had excused herself to the bathroom and literally slipped out the back door as if they were characters in a rom-com, Steve had finally been frustrated enough to say to Natasha, “Listen, you know I’m not straight, right?”

Natasha blinked at him, slowly, which was as close to an expression of jaw-dropping astonishment as he’d ever seen on Natasha. “I know you identify as bi,” she said, which was a pretty good trick, considering that he’d actually said that out loud to maybe four people in his entire life. It wasn’t that he was hiding it; it was just that, for the most part, he didn’t think it was anybody’s _business._  “But the only long-term relationship you’ve ever had was with that school friend of yours, Peggy. Nice photos of you at her wedding, by the way. You should wear suits more often.”

Steve rolled his eyes. Natasha thrived in her HR job at least partly because she was a master of getting people to volunteer information without ever actually asking them for it, but he knew that trick, and the fact that Peggy had met the love of her life after she’d gone back to England for college, and that it had shattered Steve’s heart _even though_ their lives had been heading in different directions for years by then, was even less Natasha’s business than his sexual orientation. “Well, it might have escaped your notice, but I grew up pretty Catholic,” he’d said shortly. “For a long time I figured it was a fifty-fifty shot that I’d meet a nice girl and coming out would be a moot point. By the time I figured out being bi didn’t mean I couldn’t have a preference, I’d also figured out I needed to get my own shit together before I tried to date anybody else.”

“So what’s your type when it comes to guys, then?” Natasha asked, with a glint in her eye. “Sam? Clint? Tony?”

“You do know you just named three straight men, right?”

“I’m trying to get a benchmark. Tall, short? Older, younger? Do you care if they’re fae? Because I do have this friend who—”

“Look,” Steve said, “that’s not the point I was trying to make. I’m not saying I don’t like women; I’m saying you’re focusing on the wrong set of criteria. What I care about most at the end of the day is who the person is on the inside, not what kind of package they come in.”

“That is undoubtedly the most cheeseball thing you’ve ever said, Rogers,” Natasha had replied, but apparently it did the trick, because that was right before Christmas, and for two months, she didn’t pester him about it—two months of blessed peace and quiet while he went to work and came home, worked on his sketches and listened to music and didn’t worry about how to afford picking up a check, or whether to go in for an awkward kiss at the end of the night or just walk away and save both himself and his date the embarrassment.

So he wasn’t thinking about it when she messaged him, on the morning of Valentine’s Day, that everybody was going to the bar for Friday night drinks after work—“everybody” presumably being their usual loose social group of Sam, Clint, Nat, and himself, plus the occasional non-work friend or significant other. Sure, it was odd that they didn’t all have their own plans, but whatever; maybe they were meeting up at the bar and taking off from there. He debated just begging off and heading straight home—he’d been working late nights all week to finish a project with the full expectation that he’d get sick if he did, and sure enough, now he had the scratchy throat and wheezing that probably meant he was coming down with something nasty—but the fact that she messaged him no less than three times throughout the day to confirm the plan made him wonder if there was something important about tonight. If Sam was going to pop the question to Misty, or if Nat was going to finally introduce them to _her_ significant other (name and pronouns as yet unspecified, which was driving everybody crazy with curiosity), he didn’t want to miss it.

It didn’t even click when he got to the bar and saw the dark-haired guy next to Natasha, although it was clear from their relative body language that he wasn’t the mysterious S.O. Where Natasha was resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands, casual, the stranger’s shoulders were drawn in, his hands in his lap—or, no, one hand; the other, Steve saw, was a glossy, too-smooth plastic prosthetic that didn’t quite match his skin tone, peeking out from under the dappled fur jacket that was draped over his shoulders. Steve looked up quickly, not wanting to seem like he was staring, and got the full impact of the stranger’s eyes instead. They were bright, and a little nervous, and for no reason, Steve thought of water, although the only body of water he saw on a regular basis was the East River, which was definitely _not_ that shade of crystalline blue.

“Hey,” Natasha said, waving him over to the empty seat on the other side of the stranger. Steve slid into a seat between Clint and the new guy, and Natasha continued, “Steve, this is James. James, Steve.”

“Bucky,” said James. “People call me Bucky.”

“And he lets them.” Natasha rolled her eyes. “What are you drinking, Steve?”

“Oh, no, I’m not gonna stay that long. I just came to see what was so important that you had to text me three times about it,” Steve said, pointedly.

“Wow, Rogers.” Clint, the most fidgety person Steve had ever met, glanced up from the bowl of bar nuts he was trying to flick into Natasha’s drink. “You’re gonna bail on your date without even having one drink first? Rude.”

From his subsequent yelp, it was clear that Natasha had kicked Clint under the table, but somehow the penny still didn’t drop. “I don’t have a date.”

James-Bucky looked at Natasha, blinking. “Wait a minute. Natalia, is this a setup?” he said, and then it all fell into place.

Steve had been told more or less on a daily basis, for the first eighteen years of his life, that one day his temper was going to get him in real trouble, and apparently today was the day. “What the hell is wrong with you, Natasha?” he demanded, whirling around to face her.

She did the slow blink again—that was the second time in two months, which had to be some kind of record for surprising Natasha. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I just thought it would be nice for you not to spend another Valentine’s Day alone.”

“Well, maybe I haven’t made myself clear, so let me fix that,” Steve said, through clenched teeth. “I don’t know where you got the idea that my sex life was any of your business, but it ends now. No offense, I’m sure you’re great,” he added, turning toward Bucky, “but this is ridiculous. The last thing I’m interested in is some random hookup because my annoying work friend thinks I care about being alone on a stupid Hallmark holiday.”

“But you do consider me a friend,” Natasha said, with the tiniest smirk. “If I was trying to find you a hookup, it wouldn’t take me two months to put it together, Rogers. Maybe you should give it a chance before you start making assumptions.”

“Right. I’m sure we’re just perfect for each other. That’s why you had to sneak around and lie to both of us. That’s the problem with you, Natasha. It’s not even that you can’t stay out of anybody’s personal business; it’s that you can’t have one honest conversation with anybody. Everything has to be some kind of trick with you. You know, sometimes I think you couldn’t stop manipulating people if your life depended on it.”

Steve stood up, ready to storm out of the bar in a huff. It was pure bad luck that his chair was close enough to Bucky that he knocked into Bucky’s left shoulder on the way past, and it was worse luck that his coat slipped down and slid to the floor. Bucky leaned down instinctively to grab it, but it slipped between the plastic fingers of the prosthetic, and now Steve really felt like an asshole. “Shit,” he muttered, and bent down to retrieve it.

“No!” Natasha cried, jumping out of her seat, but Steve had already draped the coat back over Bucky’s lifeless left arm. It was heavier than he’d expected: leather underneath, maybe, the outside covered in soft gray fur. “Sorry,” he said, and pushed past him again, leaving a wider birth this time. He caught a glimpse of Bucky’s wide, stunned eyes, and felt them following him as he walked away, but he didn’t look back, just headed out the door.

 

Natasha texted him six times during his subway ride home, and called twice, before he turned off the ringer on his phone. He went straight to bed when he reached his apartment and slept for the next twelve hours, but it wasn’t enough; he still woke up sniffly and achy with the start of a cold. By the time he’d gotten up, dosed himself with his rescue inhaler and the quarter-inch of DayQuil left in the bottle from last time he was sick, and put on a pot of tea, he was already on the verge of saying ‘fuck it’ to the entire day and crashing on the couch in front of some trashy old movie. Then he made his second-biggest mistake of the week: while he waited for the tea to steep, he sat down and unlocked his phone screen.

He blinked, slowly, while his brain translated what he was seeing. He’d never gotten the icon for 99+ notifications before.

Immediately concerned that something awful had happened to the world while he was asleep, he opened the text screen first and was reassured to see that the first dozen messages he skimmed didn’t allude to anything horrifying. Most of them were just… bizarre. Between Natasha’s increasingly panicky texts, mostly along the lines of **call me now im srs rogers we need 2 talk abt this** and **pick up ffs whats wrong with u,** there were school friends he hadn’t seen in years writing **OMG congrats** and **So happy 4 you!!!** , and one from Peggy that he stared at for a full thirty seconds: **You utter bloody arse. How could you not tell me??? In all seriousness, mazel tov, darling; Angie and I wish you all the happiness in the world, even if I do expect your apology and a full report on the love of your life posthaste.**

It was about then that he realized what must have happened. Somebody—he instantly suspected Tony, although Clint and Sam were still very much in the running—must have hacked one of his social media accounts and changed his relationship status as a Valentine’s Day prank. _Shit._  

He was scrolling through the rest of the messages, wondering just how much damage control he was going to have to do—less in terms of people thinking he was actually dating or engaged or whatever his status said now, more in terms of how many years his coworkers were going to be roasting him about this—when there was a buzz from the speaker by the door. Natasha, probably. And if she cared enough to come over to apologize in person, she’d care enough to keep bugging him until he heard her out. He got up and pressed the speaker button. “Yeah?”

“Steve? It’s Bucky, from last night,” said the voice on the other end, and Steve felt a sudden twinge of… well, he didn’t really know what he felt. Truth be told, Bucky _was_ remarkably attractive. If Natasha had set up the situation differently… But she hadn’t, and Steve was pretty sure nobody would consider dating him after they’d seen him blow a gasket like that. As if a guy that pretty would’ve wanted Steve anyway. “Can I come up? We really need to talk.”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, sure.” Steve buzzed him in, stared stupidly at the door for a moment while he wondered what this could possibly be about, and belatedly realized that he was still in the worn-out T-shirt and sweatpants that served as his pajamas just about the time it was too late to go grab anything else. Well, it wasn’t as if his chances could get any more ruined. He waited until Bucky knocked, then swung open the door.

Bucky, to Steve’s complete lack of surprise, looked great. He was wearing the same gray coat as yesterday, over jeans and sneakers—in the cold light of morning, it was definitely a biker jacket; Steve must have been in worse shape than he thought the night before, because he would’ve sworn it had been a dress coat then—but it didn’t surprise Steve at all that Bucky pulled off casual clothes better than most people could pull off formalwear. Once again, the only jarring note was his eyes, which kept darting away from Steve’s gaze, never settling anywhere. “Hi,” he said, and held out a small velvet-covered box to Steve. “Um, I want you to know I’m really sorry about this. It’s… a weird situation, right? But since we’re both stuck with it—I mean, not that I think I’m _stuck_ with you, I just—shit, I’m sorry, I’m fucking this all up, but I just want to say, now that we’re here, I’m committed to making it work if that’s what you want, you know?”

“What are you talking about?” Steve said, sincerely confused, as he took the box. He lifted the lid, and a gold ring glinted back at him. “Is this…is this a wedding ring?”

“I thought you might want to get married the human way, too,” Bucky said, softly, almost shyly.

“The hu—” Things were starting to fall into place for Steve with dizzying speed. Holy shit. _Holy shit._ “Are you telling me you’re fae?”

“You didn’t get Natasha’s texts?” Bucky said, with an expression of dismay that must have mirrored Steve’s own. “Steve, I’m a selkie, and you took my sealskin last night. You do know what that means, right?”

Softly, but with sincere feeling, Steve said, “Fuck.”

 

“Okay, so tell me exactly how this works,” he said, once he’d let Bucky in and they’d sat down at opposite ends of the sofa. “Because I thought the whole marriage thing involved _stealing_ your… skin… coat… thing and hiding it from you, not giving it back.”

“Common misconception,” Bucky said. He looked miserable, with his shoulders drawn in tight and his head bowed, his right hand clutching his left arm just below the shoulder. Whatever reaction he’d been hoping for, this clearly wasn’t it. “If somebody steals my skin and hides it, I can’t shapeshift until I get it back. Technically I _could_ leave without it, but I don’t know anybody who would. If I ever left my sealskin behind, I’m honestly not sure I’d even know who I was anymore. On the other hand, if you take my skin and give it back, now I have a permanent obligation to you. Hence, married. You don’t have to tell me that’s messed up, I already know, but that’s the way it is.”

“But you didn’t want to give it to me,” Steve said, “and I didn’t want to take it.” He pressed his fingertips to his temples; what had started as a sinus headache had turned into a plain old headache, and it was getting worse. “Not that you’re not... I mean, you seem like a nice enough person, it’s just… if I ever get married, I want it to be for love, not because of an _accident.”_

“That’s the dream,” Bucky agreed, wryly. “A lot of fae stuff is like that, though. The letter of the law is what matters, not the intent. Selkies grow up hearing all the time about how careful we have to be if we wear our skins out in public. I know people who keep theirs locked up in a safe, only take it out when they’re going on vacation to the beach or something, and even then they can’t enjoy it because they’re so worried about losing it.” He pulled the coat a little tighter around his shoulders as he spoke, a half-conscious gesture of reassurance. “I could never leave mine for that long. Most of us can’t. It’s too big a part of who we are.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. When Bucky shot him a quizzical look, he clarified, “Not about you being a selkie; I mean about putting you in this position. The last thing I’d ever do is... prank somebody into marriage. But if neither of us wants it, then can’t we just pretend it never happened?”

“Christ, I wish,” Bucky said flatly. “Have you checked your Facebook today?”

“I thought it got hacked,” Steve said. “Anybody can change a relationship status, though.”

“You can’t,” Bucky said flatly. “I can’t. Fae marriage is permanent.”

“Are you telling me we can’t undo an accidental marriage because we’re _Facebook official?”_

“I don’t make the rules.” When Steve just stared at him, Bucky sighed. “I’m telling you that we can’t undo it because we’re dealing with fae law, not human law. The Facebook thing is just a symptom. Fae magic does really wacky things when it runs up against human technology. The point is, it’s like that everywhere now. If you go down to the courthouse, you’ll find a marriage certificate for us—it won’t look like a regular state of New York one, but it’ll be there, stamped and filed.”

“So we have to get a divorce?” Steve said, astounded.

“We can’t do that either,” said Bucky. “Fae law doesn’t have any provisions for divorcing a human. And yeah, I know we’re behind the times, don’t tell me about it. Between us, a lot of the old conservative fae are pretty racist. They have this stupid idea that selkies ‘aren’t fae enough’ because we can’t do any magic except the skin thing, so they don’t care how bad we get fucked over by the system.”

“There’s gotta be a loophole,” Steve said firmly.

Bucky shook his head. “Ask me what I do for work, Steve,” he said.

“What do you do for work, Bucky?”

“I’m a law student at SUNY. Right now I’m interning at an office that handles interactions between human and fae law.”

“So you’re a fairy lawyer?”

“Well, no, I haven’t passed the bar yet,” Bucky said. “But there’s no loophole. Trust me, I’ve _looked.”_

Steve shook his head in disbelief. “So just because I knocked your coat on the floor and handed it back to you, now we both have to be legally married to a stranger forever?”

“Well,” Bucky said, eyeing the ring box on the coffee table, “we don’t have to be strangers.”

In a flatly skeptical tone that would have made Natasha proud, Steve said, “You are not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting.”

“Well, uh,” Bucky said, biting his lower lip, “at this point, there’s not a lot to lose by giving it a shot. I mean, Natasha was setting us up because she thought we’d get along, so it’s not like there’s a hundred percent chance we’re gonna hate each other. Maybe we should get to know each other before we decide we should only talk when we have to file taxes or something.”

“Wow. Compared to everything else I just heard, that almost sounds reasonable, Bucky.”

“So you got your first reason to like me,” Bucky said, with the ghost of a smile on his lips. “I’m surprisingly good at pleading cases.”

Steve opened his mouth to say something biting—something about how he didn’t give a shit what the reasoning was, this was wrong, and he was _not_ going to pretend to be married to some total stranger; he was going to talk to a human lawyer, and faerie rules could shove it. It was Bucky’s face that stopped him. Not, as he was beginning to admit to himself, because that face happened to be extraordinarily attractive, but because underneath the smile, Bucky looked so undeniably scared. That was when it finally hit Steve: for him, this was a bizarre inconvenience, but for Bucky, it was a fear he’d faced for his entire life. And yet, with presumably nothing to go on except Natasha’s word that Steve was an okay person and not an abuser or a psychopath, Bucky had come here and put one of the biggest decisions of his life entirely under Steve’s control. He didn’t know whether to be impressed by the balls that must have taken, or horrified. “Prove it,” he heard himself say. “I mean, before we go any further with this, I’m gonna need you to prove you even are a selkie, and that this isn’t some kind of weird con or something.”

Bucky stood up. “Okay,” he said, “but you’re not gonna like it.”

 

“You couldn’t just, I don’t know, do this in a bathtub?” Steve stood on the right side of the safety barricade at the edge of Brooklyn Bridge Park, shivering, while Bucky, who’d already hopped the railing, undid the laces on his shoes. “No offense, but this seems stupidly dangerous.”

“Nope,” Bucky told him. “It has to be water that’s connected to the ocean. Doesn’t have to be salt water, as long as it’s close enough to sea level, but it can’t be a tub or a swimming pool.” He shot a crooked smile at Steve. Whether it was the proximity of the water or something else, he looked lighter out here, less self-conscious. “Don’t worry about it. Seals are made to swim in colder water than this. You know the polar bear plunge? A lot of the guys who do that are selkies. It’s a thing.”

“Sure, but at some point you’ll have to turn back,” Steve pointed out.

“As long as I have my skin, I won’t feel it too much. The only part that sucks is stripping down and getting dressed again.” As if to emphasize the point, Bucky reached for his belt buckle. Steve averted his eyes, and Bucky smirked. “You’re allowed to look. We _are_ married, you know.”

“I’m not that curious,” Steve said dryly.

“Yeah, you are. You’re just a prude.” Bucky laid his coat over the railing and started to lift his sweatshirt over his head instead. Then he paused. “Actually, you might not want to see this part.”

“Please,” Steve said. “I’ve probably spent a quarter of my life so far in hospitals. Whatever’s going on with your arm, it’s not gonna bother me.”

“Your funeral.” Bucky slid his right hand under the collar of his shirt and undid a strap, then gave his left arm a tug just below the shoulder. The prosthetic came loose, and he set the plastic assembly down gently before he used his right hand to tug his shirt over his head. Unable to decide if it would be more rude to look or more rude not to, Steve let his eyes trail across Bucky’s surprisingly muscular chest and over his left shoulder, to where his arm ended abruptly in a short stump. “You can ask, you know. It’s okay. You might already hold the record for not asking.”

“You don’t have to tell me.” It was sort of a welcome relief to have something to wonder about, actually, because Bucky was taking his jeans off for real this time; Steve caught a glimpse of a well-formed thigh and decided it was a good time to get very interested in the Manhattan skyline just across the river. “We just met, and even if we hadn’t, you don’t owe your story to me or anybody else.”

“Yeah, but you gotta be wondering,” Bucky said, and when Steve resolutely kept his eyes front, he sighed. “Nat wasn’t kidding when she said you were one stubborn human, Steve Rogers,” he said, and swept up the coat, wrapping it around himself. It had changed again, a long duster that almost swept the ground. “You should watch this, though,” he added. “This is the fun part.” Then he stood up, crossed his right arm over his chest, and dropped into the East River.

“Shit! Bucky—” Steve ran to the railing when he heard the splash, not quite believing that Bucky wouldn’t be either drowning or going hypothermic in the icy water, but the face looking up at him wasn’t human at all. It was a sleek gray harbor seal, and it looked as amused as it was possible for a seal to look. Its left fin ended in a stump, too, but that didn’t seem to slow Bucky down in the water; Steve watched the seal turn a slow circle and wave its right flipper at him, then dive, skimming away under the surface with remarkable speed. It was exactly like watching an animal at the zoo, but Steve caught his breath when he realized he was watching _actual faerie magic_ at work. His mother had told him once, a long time ago, that if he ever did see real magic, his brain would shrug it off, tell him it looked like a movie special effect or that he couldn’t be seeing what he was seeing. _Humans,_ she’d said, _aren’t built to believe in certain things. But trust yourself and don’t waste time on disbelief if you have any reason to think there are fairies about, Stevie; one day, your life may just depend on it._

The seal that had been Bucky a moment ago abruptly heaved itself up out of the water and onto the rocks just below where Steve was standing, looked at him with what Steve could’ve sworn was a smirk, and suddenly shook its whole body, filling the air with water. Steve jumped back, even though the nearest splash missed him by a mile, and then, somehow, the seal stretched its body upward and was Bucky again, wearing the gray fur coat and nothing else. “Don’t just stand there, Rogers, give me the towel,” he said, and Steve shook himself out of his trance and tossed Bucky the bath towel he’d brought along. “Boxers too,” Bucky added. “C’mon, hurry up, unless you want our first couples activity to be you bailing me out of jail for indecent exposure.”

“You didn’t seem worried when you were putting on that show a minute ago,” Steve said, locating Bucky’s boxers _and_ jeans and handing both items down to him.

“A minute ago I could’ve just swam away and left you to take the rap.” After Bucky had wriggled into the jeans, he pulled himself back over the railing, awkwardly, a little off balance. “You gonna be weirded out if I ask you to pass my arm over here?”

Steve was, actually, a little, but he would have died before he admitted it. He lifted the prosthetic and inspected the strap, working out how it stayed in place; then he said, “C’mere,” and reached up to put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, guiding the stump of his arm into the socket. “How tight do you want this?”

Bucky looked startled, and then his lips twitched up at the corners. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, and thanks for not being squeamish, but this part’s easier to get right if I do it myself,” he said, and a moment later the arm was reattached and his shirt was back on, which meant Steve could stop worrying about where his eyes might go next. The gray coat was already almost dry, and the only evidence that Bucky had been in the harbor was in the beads of water dripping from his long dark hair. He was still towelling it dry as he started to walk back toward the subway station. “So, you’ve probably got some questions, right?”

Steve did, a lot of them, but the only one he had the words for was, “What’s it like?”

“You mean changing?”

“I mean…” Steve took a deep breath. “Being that free.”

Bucky stopped walking—which was a good thing, as it gave Steve a second to catch up with his much longer strides—and looked at him. “You picked up on that, huh?”

“It was the first time I’ve seen you when you didn’t look scared.”

Bucky tipped his head to the side and looked hard at Steve, as if he was weighing his next words carefully—but whatever he would have said was lost when Steve shivered violently, then sneezed. “Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah, I just have a cold. I’m fine.”

Bucky sighed. “If you have a cold, then by definition you’re not fine, you’re sick. I wish you’d said something before I made you stand there freezing your ass off while I fucked around in the water. Here.”

Bucky slid out of his coat and settled it over Steve’s shoulders. It was too long for him, by a lot, but Steve couldn’t deny that it was warm, and while he’d expected it to reek of river water or worse, it had a faint but not unpleasant animal smell. “What?” Bucky said, while Steve looked up at him in surprise, running his hand over the soft fur. “It’s not like we can get any more accidentally married, is it?”

“I just… it’s your…”

“It’s not a security blanket. I can let go of it for five minutes.” But Steve noticed that Bucky kept one hand on the sealskin, the flat of his palm resting between Steve’s shoulder blades, as he steered him down the sidewalk and toward a brightly lit storefront. By the time he realized Bucky was propelling him into a drugstore, Bucky had already picked up a basket and started walking purposefully toward the aisles. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for eye of newt and toe of frog to brew up in my cauldron, obviously. I’m getting you some medicine, for fuck’s sake. You have any allergies?”

“Only to nature.”

Bucky looked concerned. “Dogs?”

“Surprisingly, I can be around dogs. Just not cats, dust, pollen, mold, smoke, most perfumes—”

“Don’t buy you flowers for our anniversary, got it,” Bucky said, picking up a bottle of pills from the shelf. Steve felt himself blush. “You want the honey-lemon cough drops or are you one of those weird people who likes the gross cherry kind?”

“Neither, because I’m _fine,”_ Steve said, and watched Bucky drop the honey-lemon package into the basket. “You know, you’re taking this whole thing a lot better than you were an hour ago.”

Bucky shrugged. “An hour ago, you were a stranger,” he said, rounding the corner into the grocery aisle. “Now you’re a stubborn pain in my ass, but you saw my arm and my shapeshifting trick and you didn’t run away screaming. That’s not nothin’ in my world. You want the traditional chicken noodle soup or the beef stew? No, you know what, I’m gonna get both. You look kind of anemic.”

“Only if you believe every doctor I’ve ever had.” Now it was his turn to shrug when Bucky looked at him sharply. “And we haven’t even talked about the asthma, the scoliosis, the hearing loss, or the heart murmur yet. You starting to see why a missing arm doesn’t freak me out so much?”

Bucky cracked a genuine smile at that. “I see why Nat thought we were so perfect for each other. Together we just about add up to one fully functional person,” he said, shifting the basket onto his prosthetic arm and heading toward the cash register. He glanced back at Steve once as he greeted the clerk, then leaned in close to ask a question, turning his back to Steve—and Steve, wrapped up in a selkie skin, found himself surprised by how much he wished that could be true.

 

“Okay, promise me you won’t laugh, because this is a serious problem and I really need your help.”

“Oh, dearest, you know me too well to ask me to promise any such thing.” Peggy was leaning back on the sofa in her London flat, looking flawless as usual, dressed to the nines and, if Steve had figured the time zones right, probably getting ready to go out for dinner and a show, maybe with a little dancing afterward. Steve felt even more pathetic than usual by comparison. He was sitting up in bed with his laptop on his knees; as soon as they got back, Bucky had herded him there like some kind of relentless border collie before setting up the nightstand with tea and tissues and soup and an extra blanket and, of course, various medicine bottles and instructions about when to take them. He’d programmed his number into Steve’s phone, then left, with surprisingly firm orders to rest and call if he needed anything—and Steve, who’d spent so much time staring at his bedroom ceiling as a kid that he usually resisted staying in bed unless he absolutely had to, had actually been tempted to take his advice and curl up for a nap. This call was too important to delay, though, and not just because he wanted to explain why he hadn’t told Peggy about his sudden marriage before it was announced to the world via Facebook post.

Peggy was also an expert on the weird intricacies of fae culture, and unlike Bucky, she came at it from the human side of things. That was why he was convinced that, if anybody could find a solution to this mess, it was Peggy Carter.

He told her the story as briefly as he could—the bar, the coat, Bucky showing up this morning with the announcement—and Peggy listened quietly until he’d said his piece and run out of steam. Then she said, “Well, you’ve left out the most important point, darling, as usual.”

“What’s that?”

“What does he look like?”

“I—” Steve sputtered. “I don’t see how that’s _relevant,_ Peggy.”

“So he’s handsome. Duly noted.”

“Come on, I know you’ve already looked him up on Facebook. Hell, considering I’ve been too busy to actually look at my computer since last night, you probably know more about him than I do.”

“Oh, without a doubt,” Peggy said, entirely without shame. “Where he lives, where he works, what he likes, and which of his friends sound the most disappointed to hear he’s off the market. But I wanted to know how you feel about this, not just what you think you’re supposed to feel.”

“There’s nothing to debate here, Peggy. I’m married to someone I don’t know, and how I feel about that is—even if I wouldn’t say no to a date with him under ordinary circumstances, these _aren’t_ ordinary circumstances. Look, I may not exactly be a practicing Catholic anymore, but I don’t think the Church is wrong to look at marriage as a sacrament. It’s definitely not something you jump into because you met a hot stranger at a bar. How long were you with Angie before you knew she was the one?”

“A good twenty minutes at least. No, darling, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t tease you. It was a very important twenty minutes. And you’re right; it’s not fair that you were denied your chance to make a decision, or that he was. Do you want me to look into whether I can find any precedents your selkie might have missed?”

Steve let out a breath. “Please. I’ll pay you for your time.”

“That’s possibly the most insulting thing you’ve ever said to me, but considering the stress you’re under, I’ll forgive you this once.”

“I won’t let it happen again,” Steve said, allowing himself a small, relieved smile. “But you’re not wrong, this is kind of… overwhelming. Let’s talk about something else. How are you?”

“Oh, the usual. Tired, queasy, wondering why I ever thought this was a good idea.”

“You mean besides the fact that you’ve wanted kids since you were four years old, and that you’re a brilliant, amazing woman who’s going to be great at balancing work and motherhood?”

“You see? If you do decide to keep your selkie, all you’ve got to do is talk to him like that.” Peggy smiled. “I do love you, Steve.”

Steve smiled back. It almost didn’t hurt. “Love you, too, Peggy,” he said, before he disconnected the video chat and turned to set the laptop on the one flat surface that Bucky hadn’t taken over: the windowsill.

Then he yelped, because Clint was crouching on the fire escape.

“I don’t know what to ask first,” he said, once he’d opened the window and let Clint climb in over the radiator, bringing a blast of cold air and a fair amount of slush along with him. “Why you’re here, how you got my address, why you thought it was a good idea to climb the building instead of texting me like a normal person, or why I shouldn’t kick you out before you can do any more damage.”

“Natasha sent me,” Clint said easily. “Which basically answers all of those. You weren’t answering your messages, and she was worried.”

“Tell her I’ve got a lot going on this weekend. And also tell her I could report her for sharing my home address without permission. The stuff in the HR files is all supposed to be confidential.”

“You really think Nat doesn’t have enough dirt on the higher-ups to keep her job safe? Anyway, can I report back to her that you’re not dead and you don’t hate her guts forever?”

“Yes to the first thing,” Steve said. “I’m still thinking about the other part.”

“You get a guy stuck in an irreversible marriage to a stranger _one time,”_ Clint said, with an expression of mock woe. “When something like that happens to me, I just call it Tuesday.”

Steve threw a pillow at him. “Get out.”

 

In the early hours of the next morning, the heat in Steve’s building went out.

What Steve knew about HVAC systems could fit inside a thimble, but according to Helen, the little old lady who lived across the hall, it was something about the boiler, and apparently the building super was in Las Vegas and the backup wasn’t answering his phone. She was also of the opinion that something about this was probably illegal, but she couldn’t give him anything concrete about when to expect it to be fixed.

Steve had known it was an old, creaky building with too little insulation when he moved in, but he hadn’t known just how fast it would lose whatever heat was left inside it on a bitingly cold Sunday morning in February. He put on a second sweater and wrapped himself up in a blanket, which helped for a while, but once it was clear that he wasn’t going to be able to stick this one out, he swallowed his pride and started skimming through the contacts on his phone. Peggy was too far away to help him this time; Pepper was out of town; Tony would mean well, but he’d bail the second he realized he was dealing with a sick person and spend the next week sanitizing everything that came near him; Sam would take him in without hesitation, but would also make fun of him mercilessly about the whole marriage thing, and while Steve would definitely deserve it given how much he’d trolled Sam at the office over the past two years, he wasn’t in the mood to deal with it right now. He didn’t feel like seeing Clint again so soon, and he wasn’t sure how long he planned to keep not speaking to Natasha, but it was definitely going to be longer than this. Unfortunately, that left only one glaringly obvious option.

“Wow, you weren’t kidding,” Bucky said when he walked in. Today the gray fur was on the inside of the sealskin and the outside had the look of a dark leather bomber jacket, hitting him low on the hips and drawing Steve’s eyes to exactly where they didn’t need to go. “It’s fucking freezing in here. Building’s really quiet, too. I take it everybody who had somewhere else to go has already bailed?”

“Yeah, nobody’s holding their breath that it’ll be fixed before Monday. Our super isn’t that great at the best of times.”

“Okay. You got your bag packed already, or should I go move my car while you get your stuff together? Because I’m parked, uh, let’s just say not incredibly legally.”

Steve looked up at him in shock. “When I asked you to help me with this,” he said, “I meant, could you go out and buy me a _space heater.”_

“Steve, it’s like fifty degrees in here already and it’s supposed to drop below freezing overnight. You’re gonna wind up with pneumonia if you stay here. Just come to my place.”

“Absolutely not. I can’t put you out like that.”

“Listen, compared to accidentally marrying me, crashing at my place is a pretty small inconvenience. Come on,” he said, when Steve didn’t return his smile. “It’ll be fun, like a sleepover. It’s not like I’m offering you charity or something, if that’s what you’re worried about. You’re buying the pizza and I’m picking the movie, at minimum.”

“Thank you, Bucky, but really, you don’t have to do this. I can get by on my own.”

“I know,” Bucky said, reaching out and laying his right hand on Steve’s shoulder. His eyes, locked on Steve’s, were dazzlingly blue. “But the thing is, you don’t have to.”

Steve was perfectly well aware that he had a stubborn streak. God knew enough people had told him so over the years. And maybe it was just that he really wasn’t feeling well or maybe it was just the overt weirdness of the situation taking a toll on him, but standing there, looking into Bucky’s face, he could have sworn he felt the core of stubbornness inside him crack. “Go move your car,” he said. “I’ll get my stuff.”

 

Bucky’s place was half of a brownstone in Vinegar Hill, near the Navy Yard. “And if you’re wondering how a law student can afford a place like this,” he said, while he fished his keys out of his pocket, “I couldn’t, if my mom didn’t own the duplex. She’s gonna sell it when she retires, but she’s giving me a hell of a deal on the rent until then. The whole deal was kind of a bribe to get me to stay in Brooklyn, but, well, I was in a pretty bad place at the time, and I wasn’t exactly in a position to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Steve knew the feeling. “It’s a nice place.”

“Don’t say that ’til you meet my obnoxious roommate.” Bucky turned the key in the lock. Instantly, there was a flurry of barking. Based on the tone, Steve braced himself to be rushed by a massive pit bull, but the dog that raced out of the house wasn’t even knee-high to him. It was still a solid enough animal that he staggered when it crashed into him, and Bucky braced him with his right arm before giving the dog a sharp command in some language that wasn’t English. “Calm down, jeez,” he told it, while it sat, reluctantly, fixated on Steve and quivering with excitement. “He’s not here to play with you. Steve, this is Morgana. Molly, for short.”

Steve eyed the dog cautiously and held out his hand for it to sniff. “Morgana as in Le Fay?”

“Yep. ’Cause she’s magic.”

“Okay, I honestly can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“Nope,” Bucky said, getting down on the floor to ruffle the dog’s fur. “Corgis are fae as fuck. My friend Bobbi breeds ’em.”

Admittedly, Steve hadn’t spent a lot of time in the fae world, but it was hard to see anything mystical about a short, fuzzy dog that had just snuffled at him and given his hand a slurp with a disturbingly long, wet tongue. He was too cold and tired to pursue the point, though. “Where can I put my stuff?”

“Upstairs, in the room on the right.” Bucky tipped his head toward the stairs; his good hand was busy patting the dog. “I put clean sheets on the bed, so you can get right in it if you want.”

Out of a combination of habit and stubbornness, Steve started to object that he wasn’t _that_ sick, but he suddenly realized he’d been up since Helen started her commotion about the boiler in the hallway at four A.M, and exhaustion hit him like a tidal wave. “I think I’ll take you up on that,” he said. “Could you bang on the door and wake me up in an hour?”

“If Molly doesn’t wake you up barking first. Which she might. Fair warning, she’s kind of an asshole. Aren’t you, Mol?” Bucky went back to fussing over the dog, and Steve picked up the bag that held his computer and meds and headed upstairs.

Bucky’s place was furnished in early twenty-first century Ikea, putting it about a thousand style points ahead of Steve’s, which was mostly decorated in late twentieth-century thrift shop. He was sitting down on the bed to take his shoes off when a framed photo on the nightstand caught his eye. It was Bucky, in a nice suit, with a woman who looked the right age to be his mother and three dark-haired girls who looked too much like him to be anything but his sisters: one in a wedding gown, the other two in frilly bridesmaids’ dresses. One selkie in the family must have avoided Bucky’s fate, at least. He made a mental note to ask about them later—and then he shook his head and told himself not to be an idiot. Peggy was going to get him out of this before he ever met Bucky’s family, much less actually became a part of it.

It was kind of weird to put a family photo in the guest room, though. That was the kind of thing most people would keep beside their own…

Oh. Of course. If he hadn’t been so out of it, he would’ve realized immediately. But on a second glance, there was way too much personal stuff scattered around for this to be a guest room. Which meant he was not only in Bucky’s bedroom, he’d been about to get into Bucky’s _bed._

“Hey, Steve.” Bucky chose that moment to stick his head in the doorway. “You got everything you need? I just realized I should’ve offered you some tea or someth—”

“I need to make sure we’re absolutely clear on this,” Steve said. “I’m not going to sleep with you, Bucky.”

Bucky blinked. “What?”

His surprise seemed genuine, but Steve was committed now. “First you tried to give me a wedding ring,” he said, “and now you’re trying to get me to sleep in your bed, and I… Listen, Bucky, even if this is a legal marriage, which I’m still not convinced about, sex isn’t a thing that’s on the table for me, okay?”

For a split second, neither of them moved, and then Bucky’s eyes filled up with—Steve couldn’t put a word on it, exactly: hurt? Resignation? Some combination of both? Either way, he shrank back a step, hugging his sealskin close to his body. “So which is it?” he asked, softly. “You got that high an opinion of yourself, or you got that low an opinion of me?”

“It has nothing to do with you,” Steve said, equally surprised. “I’m talking about me. I’m telling you it’s not something I’m—”

“No, you’re not,” Bucky said, with a flash of anger. “You think this is some kind of fae trap, and I’m trying to trick you into… I don’t know, something even worse than being stuck in a marriage you didn’t want. Because fae are all like that, right? We’re all sneaky, tricky, sex-obsessed people who are always trying to get humans to give us something for nothing. Well, news flash, Rogers: I didn’t want this either. I’ve spent my whole life being afraid I’d get forced into something I didn’t choose and two people’s lives would get ruined because of it. But now that it _did_ happen, I was hoping I could at least convince you not to hate me for the circumstances I didn’t get any say in. I talked you into coming here because I didn’t think you’d be safe at your place with no heat; I gave you my bed because you’re sick, and you said you’ve got a bad back, and I figured I’d have an easier time than you would dealing with a couple nights on the crappy pull-out couch. I’m trying to be the best person I can be under some incredibly fucked-up circumstances. And now you think I’m doing this to get you to sleep with me? I wish you’d just said you couldn’t deal with my arm, for Titania’s sake. Then at least I could’ve told myself it wasn’t personal.”

A long, uncomfortable silence fell over the room, and Steve looked down at his feet, guilt-stricken. Finally, he forced himself to look up and meet Bucky’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “And you’re right, I probably do have a lot of problematic stuff to unlearn about the fae. But what I meant is that… I know nobody ever believes it when somebody says ‘it’s not you, it’s me,’ but in this case, it really is me. I haven’t been with anybody in… you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how long, and until Natasha got involved, I was just as happy for it to stay that way forever.”

Bucky took a deep breath. Then he crossed the room and sat down on the bed—at a polite distance, maybe eighteen inches away. “You telling me you’re asexual?”

“Maybe?” Steve said carefully. “Not completely, but what they call gray-A fits me pretty well, I guess. I went to a therapist for a while who tried to convince me I just had trust issues, but I finally had to accept that it goes a lot further than that. It’s not that I’m never attracted to people; I am, men and women both. It’s just that I’m usually not interested in taking it any further than that. There has to be a serious connection for me to want to make it physical, even a little bit. A long-term thing. You know, love. Trust. Shared life experiences. I don’t really get into it unless we have something that’s real, not—”

“Not ‘two days ago I met a stranger in a bar and now I’m in his bedroom.’ ” Bucky sighed. “Wow. This must be hell for you.”

“It’s not the best thing ever,” Steve admitted. “Of course, it’s also not ‘the thing I’ve been terrified of since I was a kid has happened, and now I’m stuck with a partner who might literally take years to be ready for sex, if it ever happens at all.’ ”

“I’d rather have that than somebody who thinks all fae are lying trickster freaks.” Bucky turned to face Steve, ocean-blue eyes open wide. “I might be fae, but I’ll never lie to you, Steve Rogers. I can promise you that.”

“I’m sorry I assumed,” Steve began, feeling about as awkward as he’d ever felt in his life.

“Don’t be. I mean, you weren’t completely wrong. I _do_ have trust issues, but I wouldn’t’ve turned you down if you’d offered. What?” he said, quirking his mouth in a little half-smile. “Nat wasn’t wrong about you being my type. I mean, you’re a stubborn, annoying punk, but I kind of like that in a person.”

“And you’re honest. And kind, even to strangers who think the worst of you. I kind of like that in a person, too.”

Bucky actually blushed. “Get some sleep,” he said, patting Steve on the shoulder. “Other than potentially marauding corgis, you’re safe here, I promise.”

 

On Monday morning, Steve tried to call in sick and got through two sneezes, half a sentence, and most of a coughing fit before Maria said, “You know what, Rogers, why don’t you just work remotely this week? I don’t really need a disease vector in my office.” He was still lying in bed, debating whether to log in and try to do a little work on his laptop or just burn a sick day and worry about it tomorrow, when he heard Bucky come upstairs, shut the bathroom door and start the shower. A moment later, a series of thumps followed him up the staircase, and then thirty pounds of muscle and fluff landed on the bed. Steve stifled a yelp as Molly the corgi flopped down on top of him.

“You’re very pushy, did you know that?” he asked her, and got a wet dog nose to the face for his trouble. There was obviously no choice but to lie there and scratch her ears while Bucky took what had to be the world’s longest shower, then shut off the water.

“What kind of person steals a mattress?” he asked, when Bucky finally came into the bedroom with the sealskin wrapped around him like a bathrobe.

“What?”

“I could hear you singing in the shower. ‘Pull the sheets right off the corner of the mattress that you stole from your roommate back in Boulder.’ Who does that? The roommate must be incredibly confused.”

Bucky’s puzzled expression broke up into laughter, and he leaned against the doorframe, shaking his head. “I never thought about it. But you’re right, that’s messed up, isn’t it? Okay, new rule for our relationship: even if you hate me, no stealing my mattress.”

“I’m not going to steal anything. And I don’t hate you. I… actually really enjoyed hanging out with you last night.”

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” Bucky said, rifling through the closet for work clothes. “So I know that wasn’t officially a date, but if it had been, would I get another one?”

Steve considered it. They hadn’t done anything special, just ordered a pizza and turned on some flashy action movie that he couldn’t follow the plot of at all, other than the fact that it had involved a lot of car theft and explosions. Not that it had mattered; they’d ended up talking to each other through most of it, occasionally petting the dog who’d taken up residence between them on the center couch cushion, until Steve got tired enough to drift off. At the end of the night, there’d been no awkward not-a-kiss moment, no _I just think I’m looking for something else right now,_ no disappointing walk home while he beat himself up about not being normal: just Bucky nudging him awake when the credits rolled and telling him to go up to bed. It hadn’t felt like a perfect date; it had felt like… well, like they were married. “Yeah,” he said. “I think you would.”

“How about tonight? I could make dinner. ...What, you have plans?”

“I was kind of hoping my apartment might be habitable by then.”

“Oh.” Bucky’s back was to Steve, and one syllable wasn’t much to go on, but he wondered if that was really disappointment in Bucky’s voice or if he was imagining it. “What if it’s not?”

“If it’s not, then yeah, I’d like to hang out again.”

“Okay. Great. I mean, it’s cool either way. Just text me if you need anything today, then, I guess. And if Molly bugs you, tell her to go find you a toy. They’re all up on the bookcase, but looking for them should keep her busy for half an hour or so.”

“That sounds a little mean.”

Bucky started to say something, then stopped himself and shook his head. “You’ll see,” he said, and headed back downstairs to get dressed.

Steve waited for him to be out the door before he got up and headed downstairs himself. Bucky had left a half-full pot of coffee on the counter, and there were enough throws and pillows on the couch to build a respectable blanket fort. Molly watched him settle in, and after he opened his laptop, she hopped up on the couch and shoved her nose under his hand again.

“Hi,” he said, stroking the soft fur between her ears. “You know, I don’t have any treats for you, and you’re drooling on my keyboard.”

Molly gave him a witheringly contemptuous look, huffed, and lay down across his feet. “Hey, could you not—” Steve began, and tried to give her a shove, to absolutely no avail. If he hadn’t known better, he would’ve thought she was actually making herself heavier. “I don’t like bullies, even when they’re covered in fur,” he told her, and was answered with a faint snore.

Resigned to the fact that he wasn’t going anywhere for a while, he logged into his work account and started poking through his emails: approval on last week’s big project and a couple of edits to another, nothing that couldn’t wait until he had a little more brainpower to handle them. He was about to log off again when an instant message popped up, a request from Maria to video chat, which was weird enough that he clicked the Accept button to find out what was going on and sighed when the picture came up. “Wow, Nat. I know you aren’t a big fan of conventional morality, but hacking Hill’s company account is a new low.”

“Yes, but you’re talking to me, aren’t you?” Any other day, Natasha probably would’ve said it with a smirk, but today she was biting her lip, genuinely worried. “I wanted to say I’m sorry, Steve. I didn’t mean—”

“You didn’t mean for me to end up married to a selkie? Yeah, I got that part.” Seeing her face fall even further, he dialed back the sarcasm and said, “It was an accident. I get it. I’m not happy about it, but I get it.”

She didn’t quite sag with relief, but she somehow gave the impression of doing just that. “So you forgive me?”

“I will eventually.” When her face fell, Steve sighed. “Why do you care so much, Natasha?”

“About the fact that I ruined your life?” she said, raising one incredulous eyebrow.

“You didn’t—look, I won’t say it’s not a big deal, but nobody’s life is ending because of this. I still think we might find a loophole. Or we might end up having the kind of relationship where we only talk when we have to do our taxes, like he said. It’s not ideal, but we wouldn’t be the first married couple to do it. One way or another, we’ll figure something out that we can both live with.”

Natasha closed her eyes, slowly, and opened them again in an expression Steve recognized as relief. “Good,” she said. “Because I never set out to destroy anyone’s life, no matter what anybody tells you. But… I’ve made mistakes before, Rogers. I’ve got debts I can never repay. And it was going to be hard to live with if I tried to help you and ended up hurting you instead.”

“So, what, finding me a date was supposed to be some kind of karmic balance?” Steve said. “You know, in my world people just go to Confession and do penance. It’s a lot easier.”

“Did you really think fixing your sex life _wasn’t_ supposed to be a penitential act?”

Steve let himself smile at that, and for a minute, things were almost okay again—until Molly, realizing that this was her big chance, crawled up beside him and stuck her face on the keyboard. _“Hey,”_ he said, giving her an absolutely futile shove, and Natasha stared.

“Is that James’ dog?” she said, and then, “Are you at James’ _place?_ I thought I recognized that couch. Oh my God, Rogers, I’ve been killing myself with guilt all weekend and you’ve already moved in together?”

“I didn’t move in! I just—the heat’s out at my place and I needed somewhere to crash, and so help me, Natasha, if you tell anyone at the office,” he stammered, blushing, while Molly nosed at the laptop, leaving wet smudges on the screen. “Look, the reason I’m not angrier with you is because Bucky turned out to be a really nice person who’s willing to work with me on this, but don’t think I’ll forgive you if you start blabbing to everyone I know.”

“Oh, please. You know I’m going to be too busy giving James grief for the rest of the day to bother with anyone else,” Natasha said, holding up her cell phone and smiling widely. “Ta, Rogers,” she said, and signed off before he could do more than sputter.

“Wow,” he said, to the dog, because there was no one else to emote at. Any attention was apparently good attention as far as Molly was concerned, though, and she turned her head and panted at him, giving him a full blast of dog breath in his face and trying to climb even further into his lap, until he finally internally admitted defeat. “You know what? I hate to do this, but—go find me a toy,” he said, and Molly’s ears perked up and she launched herself off the couch. He felt a twinge of guilt at hearing her toenails click on the hardwood floor as she trotted into the kitchen, but she was obviously just going to make trouble if he didn’t give her something to do.

 

The first thing Bucky did when he opened the door was look at Steve, who was on the couch with Molly on his lap and a dozen dog toys littering the cushions, and crack up. “Oh, man,” he said, once he could speak again. “I’m sorry. She must’ve driven you crazy.”

“The part that’s driving me crazy isn’t that she wanted attention, it’s—” Steve picked up a well-chewed stuffed bear in bafflement, “—wondering how she got all these things down off the bookcase. I put some of them _back,_ on the fourth shelf up, and she brought them to me again fifteen minutes later. How does a dog who’s twelve inches tall manage that?”

“Told you, she’s magic,” Bucky said, sweeping the toys off the end cushion. Steve took the hint and moved his feet so he could sit down. “Sometimes she brings me toys I’m pretty sure I never bought her. Hell, one time she brought me a potato, and I didn’t have any potatoes. C’mere, Mol.” Molly promptly abandoned Steve to scramble into Bucky’s lap; Steve made a face at her and mouthed, _Traitor._ “How’re you feeling?”

It had been so long since anybody asked that it threw him a little. “Better. Thanks.”

“Any news about the apartment?”

“Oh God.”

“Okay, so I’m gonna use my amazing fae magic here and predict you’re gonna tell me it’s not fixed yet.”

“Well, the good news is, the heat’s back on. The bad news is that a pipe in the apartment above mine froze and burst while nobody was there to shut off the water main, and my kitchen ceiling is now on my kitchen floor. So, uh—”

“So you’re staying a couple more days,” Bucky said, making it more order than question. “Not that I’m complaining, I like having you here, but jeez, Steve, it’s like you had Barton over or something.”

“Barton did come over,” Steve said. “Why?”

Bucky looked at him sharply. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Oh, just… that guy has some of the weirdest luck on the planet, is all,” Bucky said. “If there’s some kind of really bizarre epic disaster going on, nine times out of ten Clint is in the middle of it.”

“That’s what people usually say about me.”

“Nah, you’ve pretty obviously got bad luck, but Clint’s got _weird_ luck,” Bucky clarified. “Like, if a tiger escaped from the zoo, it would be on the day Clint was visiting, and he’d definitely go around a corner and it’d be right in front of him, but it’d be a complete toss-up whether it would eat him or turn out to be a magic tiger and grant him three wishes.”

“Well, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but I guess I did know that about Clint,” Steve agreed. “And what do you mean, you like having me here? Even when I’m not sick, most people think I’m a pain in the ass. You said it yourself the other day.”

“Well, maybe I’m reconsidering now that we’ve spent some time together.” Bucky shifted on the couch, looking away. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“What are the rules for touching you?”

Steve stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“I know it’s kind of a cliche,” Bucky began, “but fae really like having rules. And generally speaking, we’re also pretty tactile. If I’m in a relationship, I’m used to touching the other person a lot. But I’ve also never dated a maybe-ace person before, so…”

“Yeah, touching is fine,” Steve said, aware that he was probably blushing. “I don’t live in a bubble. Just… you know, keep it PG. Let’s say above the waist for now, how’s that?”

“So would it be okay if I ever wanted to hold your hand, or put my good arm around you sometimes, or stuff like that?”

“Yeah. I like all that stuff. I never said I didn’t like physical contact, Bucky. If anything, I kind of miss it. I just…” Steve considered it; he barely knew how to think about it himself, much less explain it to another person. His _husband,_ he remembered, and wondered again how this had become his life. “I don’t like it when touching comes with expectations. I don’t want to lead anybody on and I don’t want to feel like I’m promising something I won’t deliver.”

“Okay, but, for example, just kissing somebody doesn’t imply that they’re getting sex, no matter what jackasses in bars say about it.”

“No, it doesn’t. But if I’m kissing y—” Steve backpedaled, “If I’m kissing _someone,_ I don’t want them kissing anybody else. That’s not fair to me. But I also won’t ask anybody else to give up sex forever because I don’t want to provide it. That’s not fair to them.”

“Wow,” Bucky said, absorbing this.

“Yeah. And now you see why I don’t really date a lot.”

“What if somebody wanted to date you bad enough that they were willing to do that for you? Or not do it for you, as it were.”

“You can’t possibly be saying you’d give up sex to be with somebody you just met.”

“I’m saying I’d… consider my options,” Bucky said, slowly. “Don’t get me wrong, I _like_ sex. I think sex is _great._ But plenty of people manage to be together without sex. And I don’t want to be a person who cheats on my husband, which means I’m not having sex anyway—”

“Do you think you could stop saying ‘sex’ every other word, please? It’s kind of uncomfortable for me.”

“Sorry.” Bucky was quiet for a moment, then said, “Is it okay if I still jerk off?”

“Oh my God, how are we having this conversation? Yeah, that’s fine. Just don’t tell me about it, and I’ll pretend you take so long in the shower because you just really love water.”

“That _is_ why I take so long in the shower. You live with a selkie, the water bills are gonna be outrageous. So what about hugging? Is hugging okay, or what?”

Steve looked at him for a moment, and then he genuinely laughed. “Bucky. Are you telling me all of that was because you want a hug?”

“I…” Bucky actually blushed. “Look, it’s been a really shitty day, and it’s kind of been a long time since I had somebody to come home to, and I—”

“Okay, okay. It’s fine.” Smothering another laugh, Steve said, “Come on, Barnes. Bring it in.”

“I dunno if I want to anymore, now that you’re being a jerk about it,” Bucky grumbled, but he leaned in and settled his right arm behind Steve’s back, pressing their bodies briefly together. Steve returned it, carefully sliding his own right arm between Bucky’s waist and the heavy plastic prosthetic in the sleeve of his sealskin, and felt Bucky exhale against him and settle his head on his shoulder.

“Can I ask you something now?” he said, when Bucky pulled away—leaving his hand on the small of his back, he noticed, not that he was complaining.

Bucky looked resigned. “About the arm?”

“Yeah. Why don’t you have a better prosthetic?”

“Okay, but you have to promise that you—” Bucky stopped. “What?”

“This.” Steve took the plastic hand in his, flexing the wrist joint. “It’s an old model, and it doesn’t seem like it gives you very much functionality. I did a little research today, and it looked to me like you’d be a really good candidate for something better. There was a video of this woman who was shooting a bow and arrows with this sort of robot hand they designed for her, and she had less of her upper arm left than you do.”

Bucky blinked. Then he said, “Okay, so, first off, I don’t know what kind of insurance this woman from your video has, but mine is bullshit. By the time I came out of surgery from losing the arm in the first place, I already had more medical debt than I could handle. Between that and my student loans, you better believe I took the cheapest option. Maybe someday when I’m a badass lawyer who gets to make speeches in the Seelie Court, I can rethink that—”

“Wait, they actually call it the Sealy Court?”

“See-lee,” Bucky enunciated, with exaggerated patience, “and you _really_ need to learn a little more about the fae, Steve-o. Which brings me to the second thing: robotics means metal. I’ll grant you, selkies can tolerate a lot of that compared to, say, daoine sídhe, which is pretty important when you live in Brooklyn and ride the subway. But walking around with it attached to me would be… the closest thing I can come up with is a really itchy wool sweater. It keeps you warm, but it’s so uncomfortable that maybe you’d rather be cold. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah, but there must be a way to get around that.”

“Probably, if anybody ever sinks enough money into R&D to figure it out. I’m not holding my breath, though. There aren’t a lot of fae in STEM fields. ‘Why bother with science when we have magic?’” Bucky said, with such heavy irony that he had to be quoting someone. “First rule of magic, Steve: it always fucks up more than it fixes.”

“I dunno about that,” Steve said, before his brain caught up to his mouth. “It got us here.”

Bucky flashed him a quick, tight little smile. “I know you’re not thrilled about this arrangement, but thanks for saying that, anyway.”

“I mean it, Bucky. I… I wish we’d gotten to know each other without magic being in the picture, but I’m not sorry I met you.”

Bucky grinned crookedly at him. “You’re just saying that ‘cause I promised to make you dinner. By the way, how do you feel about sushi?” he asked, and Steve let him change the subject from there, but he filed that away for future reference.

Chances were nothing would come of his idea, but he also checked Facebook and made a note of when Bucky’s birthday was, just in case.

 

On Wednesday afternoon, Steve was working—still sitting up on the bed with his laptop, even though he was actually feeling much better, because that way Molly could stretch out beside him rather than constantly trying to crawl onto his lap while he was on the couch—when the kitchen doorknob rattled unexpectedly. Molly, of course, went ballistic, racing down the stairs and barking like a crazy thing; Steve grabbed the baseball bat from behind Bucky’s bedroom door and followed. When Bucky swung the door open, he looked at Steve with alarm for a moment, and then his tired expression broke into a smile. “Are you kidding me, Rogers? Were you seriously about to try fighting off a housebreaker with that thing? It’s not like I have anything worth stealing. Besides Molly, of course.”

“That wouldn’t’ve made it right to let someone break in.” Steve lowered the bat, taking in Bucky’s pale face and red eyes. “They send you home sick?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, dropping into one of the kitchen chairs. “I’d say I was pissed at you for giving me your cold, but I don’t think that’s what this is. I’m pretty sure I’ve got the bubonic plague.”

“Aw, rats,” Steve deadpanned, and Bucky shot a look back at him was half horror at the sheer terribleness of the joke, half grudging respect, before he smothered a cough in the sleeve of his sealskin coat. Steve frowned at him, scooping Molly up—she’d seized a toy and was dancing excitedly around Bucky’s chair, trying to start a game of fetch—and said, “Give your dad a break, kiddo, he’s not feeling well. Why don’t you go up and take a shower, Buck? The steam might help, and I know the water will make you feel better. And it’ll give me time to clear out of your room. Don’t fight me on this,” he said, when Bucky opened his mouth to do just that. “You gave up your bed all week because I was sick. This is only fair.”

“No way, pal. I’m telling you, that couch will kill your back. And don’t try to out-stubborn me on this one. You’re talking to a lawyer here.”

“What do you suggest, then? Flip for it?”

“Unless you just wanna share,” Bucky said, and then, when Steve turned to stare at him, his cheeks went bright pink. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like—”

“I didn’t think that was a come-on, Bucky.” Which was a small miracle in itself, considering how oversensitive he knew he could be about that kind of thing. But then, Steve was starting to build up a strange picture of his accidental husband. Bucky had no trouble slipping into a cheerful, confident persona when he chatted with the neighbors or opened the door for the pizza guy, and he sprang into action with a sort of brusque efficiency when he saw a problem to solve, but underneath all that, Steve was starting to suspect that he was deeply, painfully lonely. “Will it bother you if I keep working?”

“No,” Bucky said. “Once I’m out, I sleep like I’m dead.” He headed upstairs, and Steve let Molly out, and then quickly back in—it was snowing, which was apparently wildly offensive to small dogs—before he followed.

It wasn’t until he was back in the bedroom that he realized the last time he’d actually shared a bed with someone else was when he’d been a tiny kid, crawling into his mother’s bed after a nightmare. The few times he and Peggy had actually tried making love, they’d been teenagers, which meant someone’s mother was always on alert if they stayed out too late—and even if they hadn’t been, Peggy wasn’t really the type to stay and cuddle. He hadn’t even thought to ask Bucky which side of the bed he wanted, and he tried a few different configurations of pillows and blankets before he decided on sitting up, on top of the comforter, with a throw over his legs and his laptop balanced on his knees. But when Bucky finally emerged from the bathroom, wearing nothing but his sealskin—soft and shapeless, draped around him in what Steve guessed was the closest thing to its natural form—he didn’t comment, just threw back the blankets and flopped onto the bed.

Steve waited for him to settle in and then, completely on instinct, reached down to stroke Bucky’s hair. The ends were damp, and it was only then that it occurred to him that he should have offered to help Bucky put it up. He drew his hand back, embarrassed, and Bucky made a little mewling noise so much like Molly’s demand for petting that Steve couldn’t help laughing a little. “Hey, Buck,” he said, “for what it’s worth, we both know this is my fault, and I really am sorry. I shouldn’t have gotten so close to you. The truth is, I wasn’t even sure if fae could get sick.”

“God, it’d be nice if we couldn’t. Me and my sisters used to go swimming at the Y every day after school, and walking home with wet hair is a great way to trash your immune system. I think there were about five years in there where somebody in the house always had the sniffles. And I was the oldest, which meant I always had to stay in and take care of the girls whenever one of them was sick. Or bust them when I caught them trying to sneak out anyway.”

“That explains a lot about you, actually,” Steve said. “What about your parents? You don’t talk about them much.”

“Dad wasn’t around,” Bucky said shortly. “He split when I was still pretty young. Mom’s a swim coach. Olympic-level, which is pretty cool, honestly. We all did competitive swimming in school, and my sister Becca actually made the U.S. women’s team the year she was eighteen. Didn’t place, but we were all proud as hell.”

“Yeah? How about you? Were you any good?”

“Used to be.” Bucky shrugged his left shoulder. “Kinda got forcibly disqualified.”

“Shit. Bucky, I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

“I know, but—”

“I mean it, Steve.” Bucky reached out from under the blankets and caught Steve’s hand, while his fingers were still tangled in Bucky’s hair. “None of this is your fault.”

“We both know that some of it kind of is,” Steve said, sensing a shift in the conversation and not sure he liked where it was going. “I did take your coat.”

“Only because you were trying to be a good person. Picking up my coat, getting all riled up at Nat on my behalf—”

“It really was not on your behalf.”

“You never would’ve been that pissed if she’d only been messing with you. That’s what she _does,_ Steve, and you’re friends with her anyway. Look, the coat thing wasn’t anybody’s choice. But I’m fae, and I’ve always known there’s a certain amount of bullshit that comes along with that. At some point you can make a choice to let it ruin your life, or you can decide to do the best you can with what you’ve got and try not to let the bad stuff get in the way of the good stuff, you know?”

Steve looked at him for a long, quiet moment. Then he said, “Screw it,” set the laptop aside, and crawled under the comforter, pulling Bucky into his arms. “C’mere, you.”

Bucky made a surprised little noise. “What’s this about?”

“I decided I’m gonna stop worrying about fixing everything and try to appreciate the good stuff for a while. And lately, that’s been you.”

“Aww.” Bucky smiled, nestling closer. “You big softie.”

“I don’t think I am.”

“You are. You act all tough, but you’re a great big sap.”

“Shut up. That’s just the fever from the bubonic plague talking.”

“Yeah, I like you a lot too, Rogers,” Bucky murmured, and then, in a move that was completely unfair, fell asleep with his head on Steve’s chest before Steve could answer.

 

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Bucky asked. He was standing on the sidewalk with his hands in the pockets of his sealskin, looking like he would have been just as happy to disappear under his multiple layers of outerwear. “Because it’s not too late to beg off. I could text her that I’m still feeling too sick to come over.”

“We’re literally in front of her house right now, Bucky. If she’s anything like my mom was, she’s already watching out the window for you, so it might be a little late to come up with a convenient excuse.”

“It’s never too late for a convenient excuse. That’s what makes them convenient.” Bucky looked at the brownstone warily, as if sharks might be lurking behind the cheerful lighted windows. “I said I’d never lie to you, but I’m perfectly willing to lie to my mother. We could go do anything else in the greater metro area besides this.”

“It’s not going to get easier if you keep putting it off, Buck.” Steve reached into Bucky’s pocket and took hold of his right hand. A week earlier, that would have been desperately uncomfortable; now he laced his fingers between Bucky’s and squeezed with hardly a thought. “You know, I’m the one who should be nervous here. I’m the one who’s meeting my in-laws for the first time. You’ve got nobody to impress except my cousin, and she likes everyone.”

“I know, and it’s not that I think they won’t like you specifically, it’s just…” Bucky sighed. “Couple ground rules, okay?”

“Are these going to be ‘don’t talk politics at the dinner table’ kinds of rules or ‘if I mess up, we’re trapped here for a hundred years’ kinds of rules?”

Bucky smiled at that. “We’re in Greenpoint, not Annwn, which means it’s only gonna _feel_ like you’re stuck eating my mom’s cooking for a hundred years. Look, I’ll try to make it easy. First, we don’t out other fae, so don’t ask anybody about exactly what they are unless they bring it up first. You already know about me, so selkie questions are fair game, but try not to make them embarrassing for either of us. Second, if anybody offers you a gift, don’t take it—it’s usually safest to make an excuse about how you can’t possibly because it’s too nice. It won’t be cursed or anything; it’s just that there are so many rules about giving and receiving presents, you _will_ mess up some little point of etiquette, and my mom will never forget it if you do.”

“Christmas morning in your house must be a real picnic.”

“You have no idea. Also, don’t start any sentences with ‘I wish,’ or ‘I’d give anything’—it’s not _as_ bad to do that around selkies, because we can’t actually pull any wish-granting shit, but it’s just generally considered rude. Seriously, the whole gratitude-and-obligations thing is a fucking landmine. It’s best if you can just stay away from it altogether. And third, and most important: whatever you do, don’t bring up my dad. That’s not a fae thing; Mom will just get pissed off.”

“Okay.” Steve took a deep breath, straightening his shoulders and brushing back the lock of hair that was always trying to fall in his eyes. “I can do this. _We_ can do this. Who knows, it might even be fun.”

“Of all the humans in New York, I get saddled with the optimist,” Bucky mock-grumbled, heading up the steps.

Steve had been right: the door opened almost before he knocked, revealing a lean, compact middle-aged woman whose hair, which must have once been as dark as Bucky’s, was shot through with gray that was eerily close in color to Bucky’s sealskin. “Sweetheart,” she said, pulling Bucky into her arms, which he tolerated with a careful smile. Then she pulled back and cupped his chin in her hands, inspecting him. “Now, are you really sick, or have you just been making excuses not to see your poor old mother?”

“Which answer gets me fussed at the least?” Bucky said warily. “I’m okay, Mom, it’s no big deal. And anyway, Steve’s been taking good care of me.” He glanced back at Steve, gesturing for him to come closer. “Steve, this is my mom, Winnie. Mom, this is Steve, my husband.”

He must have been practicing that line; if Steve hadn’t gotten to know him pretty well by now, it almost would have sounded casual, but he had, and it didn’t. Steve stepped forward, holding out his hand to Winnie. “Ma’am.”

Winifred Barnes ignored it, giving him a long, steady look. Then she said, to Bucky, “Dinner’s almost ready. Come in and say hello to your sister before we start.” She turned on her heel and went inside, leaving Bucky silently mouthing “Sorry,” at Steve before he followed.

If the reception had been chilly, at least the inside of the Barnes house was warm and bright. Two of the living room walls were covered in family photos and framed newspaper clippings next to ribbons or medals; a third was mostly taken up by a trophy case, and the fourth held a bubbling aquarium full of large, bright tropical fish. Bucky looked incongruously drab standing beside it, holding his right arm tucked tightly against his body the way he had that first night in the bar; even his sealskin coat looked less glossy than normal. He broke into a smile, though, when he spotted two teenage girls sprawled on the floor, surrounded by books and laptops. Steve recognized one of them from Bucky’s photos as the youngest of his sisters—Emily, the only one still living at home—but it was the other one, a girl with darker skin and a red scarf wrapped over a school uniform, who bounced up with a squeal and threw her arms around him. “Hey, Bucky!”

“Hey, Kamala.” Bucky patted her on the back, smiling. “So you probably heard I got married, huh?”

“Yeah.” To her credit, she almost kept the disappointment off her face—no mean feat, Steve thought, for a girl who couldn’t have been more than fifteen, with such an obvious crush. “Hi, Steve,” she said, giving him a little wave that was almost shy.

“Uh, hi,” Steve replied.

Bucky looked at Emily expectantly, but she refused to look up from her laptop. After a moment, he went over and sat on the floor next to her. “You ever gonna talk to me again, Snowball?” he asked quietly.

“Eat farts,” said Emily.

Kamala audibly gasped, then quickly pretended she was completely occupied with the other computer. Bucky, on the other hand, just looked slightly sad. “How bad is it?” he asked, in a low voice.

“She cried for _two days_ after you called,” Emily said, punching the keys on the keyboard a little harder than necessary. “And after she stopped crying, she said she was gonna lock me in my room till I’m thirty.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She’s talking about arranged marriages again.”

Bucky clenched his jaw. “I’m not gonna let that happen to you, Em.”

“You couldn’t stop it from happening to _you,_ could you?” Emily said, and Steve saw Bucky’s expression crack. It was only for a heartbeat; by the time she looked at him again, he’d set his face back into a mask of neutrality. “She makes me put my sealskin in her closet before I go to school now. I’m only allowed to have it back when I’m in the house and the doors are locked.”

This time Bucky didn’t try to hide his anger. “She can’t do that. She can’t punish you for my fuckup.”

“Yeah, well,” Emily said, in a tone that clearly meant that, yes, she _could,_ and just for a second, Steve saw Bucky clench his right hand into a fist so hard that the knuckles went white.

“I’m sorry, Snowball,” he said, earnestly. “I’ll make it up to you.”

“Yeah, sure, when you’re a big fancy lawyer who makes a gazillion dollars a year, you’re gonna make it all up to me, every little bit.” Emily finally looked up and glared at him. “The New Rock boots aren’t gonna cut it anymore, Fish Breath. I want a _car.”_

Steve couldn’t for the life of him understand why that was the thing that made Bucky slump with relief; he finally decided it must have been one of those sibling things that was mystifying to anyone who’d grown up as an only child. “I’ll talk to her,” Bucky promised. “Just hang in there for a couple days, let me do my lawyer thing. I’ll get her to come around.”

“Kids, dinner,” Winnie shouted, and Emily pushed herself up and headed toward the kitchen without responding; Kamala shot an apologetic glance and a shrug at both of them and followed.

Without a working left arm for balance, Bucky took longer to push himself up from the floor, and Steve finally went over to offer him a hand up. “Snowball?” he asked, as a distraction more than anything.

“So you’ve seen pictures of baby seals, right?” Bucky said, with a tiny smile. “Em’s sealskin stayed all white and fuzzy like that until she was twelve. It was pretty fuckin’ adorable. I’ll show you pictures.”

“You know, that implies that there are also baby pictures of you with great big eyes and a white fluffy coat,” Steve mused.

“Fuck. Forget I said anything. C’mon, let’s not keep her waiting. We’re in deep enough shit already.”

They took seats around a small kitchen table, which might have been cozy, if Winnie Barnes’ demeanor hadn’t cast such a chill over the room. It wasn’t so bad while the food was being passed around—although Steve got a considerable shock when he asked Kamala to pass the potatoes, and she reached out and extended her arm across the table to pick up the dish, stretching it at least a foot longer than its original length; only Bucky’s lecture kept him from blurting out that he’d never met a shapeshifter before. But once everyone’s plate was loaded down with pot roast and potatoes, the quintessential Brooklyn Sunday dinner, there was a moment of awkward silence that Winnie broke with, “So, Steven, what do you do?”

Steve, who desperately hated being called Steven, considered correcting her for about a quarter of a second before he decided against it for Bucky’s sake. “I’m a graphic designer. I work for a marketing company, do mockups and layouts for product pitches, mostly.”

“I thought you were an artist,” Emily said, with her mouth full. “Your Facebook says you’re always going to galleries and museums and stuff.”

Steve forced a smile, resolving to just delete his goddamned Facebook page at the earliest opportunity. “I would’ve liked to be. Had to get a job that pays the bills.”

“You certainly do, because Bucky isn’t going to support you,” Winnie said sharply.

“Mom,” said Bucky.

“Well, you’re not. You’ve got your own student loans to think about. Have you talked to him about the postnup yet?”

“What?” Steve said.

 _“Mom,”_ Bucky repeated.

“Postnuptial agreement,” Winnie said. “It’s like a prenup, but you sign it after the marriage is filed. It protects both of you, really. You may not think it’s important when you can’t divorce, but it can lay out what happens in the event of a separation.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know what it is, but…”

“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” Bucky cut in. “It’s only been a week, Mom.”

“If we did go our separate ways, I wouldn’t expect anything from Bucky,” Steve said quickly. “I’d be happy to sign something that says so. But considering it was… a surprise to both of us, we’re not exactly at the combining households stage.”

“Oh, so my son is good enough to marry but not good enough to live with?”

“That’s not what I—” Steve began, at the same time as Bucky said, “Mom, you’re being unreasonable.”

“This is really good pot roast,” Kamala said, looking at Emily a little desperately.

“Oh, I’m being unreasonable,” Winnie snapped. “Well, I’m sorry I’m such a monster that I love my children and want them to have happy lives.”

Bucky looked pained. “Mom, I’m just saying, it’s been a week. If we had moved in together, you’d say it was too soon for that. You’re not even giving Steve a chance here, and you should be. He’s a good person and this isn’t his fault.”

“No, it isn’t,” Winnie said. “It’s yours.”

Emily pushed her plate away. “I’m-done-eating-Mom-may-we-be-excused-please,” she said in a rush; next to her, Kamala looked visibly smaller, as if she was literally trying to shrink herself down and hide under the table.

Steve reached out and put his hand over Bucky’s, but he suspected it was too little, too late. Bucky’s eyes had narrowed dangerously. _“What,”_ he said.

“Well, it is. What were you thinking, being so careless? In a bar, of all places! You shouldn’t have had your skin with you at all. You might as well hand it over at a coat check. How many years have I been telling you to be _careful,_ Bucky? I wanted better for you, I really did, but you never listen, and now your whole family’s paying the price. It’s selfish, is what it is!”

Bucky started to stand up, but Steve beat him to it, pressing down on Bucky’s shoulder to keep him in his seat. “Mrs. Barnes,” he began, feeling the old white-hot rage sweep through him, leaving an eerie calm in its wake. “I understand that this is a very stressful situation for you, but there are two things you need to know. First, it isn’t Bucky’s fault. If it’s anyone’s, it’s mine. And second, your son is the farthest thing in the world from careless _or_ selfish. Before I even understood what was happening, he was already thinking about how this marriage was going to affect me. I was a stranger who changed his future with one stupid mistake, and he’s been nothing but generous and patient with me this whole time. I’m sorry you don’t like me. I don’t expect you ever will, and I probably don’t deserve it; I’m the person who got in the way of your son getting to choose who to marry, and I can’t even get my head around what that feels like to him, much less you. But whatever you think of me, don’t take it out on Bucky.”

He pushed his chair back. His coat was in the living room, and it was too cold to storm out without it, but before he went through the doorway to get it, he turned back, looking Winnie Barnes dead in the eye. “Your son is one of the genuinely nicest, kindest people I’ve ever met, and I sincerely _wish_ you could see that,” he said, before he walked out of the kitchen.

A stunned silence followed him, while he grabbed his coat from the back of the sofa and pulled it over his shoulders. Then he heard Emily say, “Well, he’s better than Brock, anyway.”

“Anybody would be better than Brock,” Kamala was muttering, as Steve went out, slamming the front door behind him.

He hadn’t intended to head for home, not really. At worst, he was going to take a lap around the block, cool off—literally; it was snowing again—and come back in to see if things had settled down. He wouldn’t apologize, because he hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true, but he would try to smooth things over; after all, the woman was his mother-in-law, and whatever he felt about her in the moment, that part wasn’t going away soon. But halfway down the block, he heard the sound of footsteps pelting up behind him. Steve, who’d been jumped and beaten up by bigger kids enough times during his childhood to have a self-preservation instinct that was finely tuned, if frequently ignored, turned around, hands instinctively clenching into fists—and Bucky was there, his right hand cupping Steve’s chin and tilting it upward.

And then Bucky kissed him.

It wasn’t a situation anything in Steve’s experience had prepared him for, not really. He’d kissed people, sure; Peggy was the first, and until tonight, she’d been the best, but he was maybe sort of asexual, not dead. He’d gone to college parties, awkwardly chatted up attractive girls and guys (it was art school, after all) and tried on many occasions to do the casual drunk-makeout thing, but it had just felt... empty. Not unpleasant, exactly, but sort of pointless. There was nothing _there,_ any more than there was when he couldn’t avoid the dutiful kiss at the end of one of Natasha’s blind dates. Bucky, though… With Bucky, he still didn’t want to go further, but he definitely wanted to keep doing _this._ It felt like more than the means to an end he wasn’t even that interested in; it felt really, really good. He found himself thinking about how “falling for someone” had always sounded like a cliche to him, and suddenly it wasn’t, at all. When he was a kid, he’d loved climbing on things and jumping off them, even when he knew for sure that the landing was going to hurt; this kiss was like that, the pure and perfect moment of teetering on the edge of something unknown, about to go over.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said, when he drew back, slightly out of breath, leaving Steve standing on the sidewalk feeling shell-shocked. “I shouldn’t have done that without asking. I know it’s a thing for you. It was just… what you did for me back there, standing up for me like that, it… It was so great and perfect and stupid all at the same time, Steve.”

Steve took a deep breath, to buy himself some time before answering, and still came up with nothing more useful than, “What?”

“I’m just saying, I’m usually the person who has to do the standing up for somebody else,” Bucky went on. “And, I mean, she’s my mother, and I love her, and I get why she’s the way she is. I’m not exactly happy you told her off, ’cause we’re both gonna be hearing about that one for years, but you _had my back,_ Steve. I didn’t realize how long it’d been since I could count on somebody for that.”

“Um,” Steve said. Here it was, the old awkwardness; he was suddenly too much aware of everything: his body, and Bucky’s, still weirdly close to his, and the fact that they were doing this in the middle of the sidewalk, which wasn’t exactly deserted, despite being in a quiet neighborhood on a cold Sunday night. He shoved his hands in his pockets, and said, “I’m not going to say I’m sorry for telling her the truth, but we can go back, and I’ll apologize for being rude, if you think it’ll help.”

“No way. I’m not going back there until she’s had some time to cool down. And you definitely shouldn’t apologize. She does this thing where she goes, ‘You _should_ be sorry,’ and it stirs the whole thing up again. But she’s not a bad person,” Bucky said, a little desperately. “I don’t want you to think she is. She’s my _mom.”_

Steve made himself breathe deeply again before answering. His chest had tightened up, but he couldn’t tell if it was an impending asthma attack or… something else, something less physical and more to do with the nervous, pleading way Bucky was looking at him. “Can we go somewhere and talk, then? Because it’s freezing out here.”

“Uh. Yeah. There’s a pizza place down the street, loved it when I was a teenager. And let’s face it, even really bad pizza is better than Mom’s pot roast.”

 

The restaurant was called Kun Lun, and Steve stared around the dimly lit dining room for several seconds before he said, “Am I just crazy, or—”

“No, it’s definitely a Chinese restaurant they retrofitted into a pizza place. Don’t get me started, I have _opinions_ about this, but the owners are fae, and they say it’s not cultural appropriation because they’re supposedly descended from dragons or something. Identity is complicated,” he said wryly.

“Tell me about it. I thought you didn’t out other fae, though.”

“Not really an issue with the Rands. You’ll see in a sec. Hey, Danny,” Bucky said, with what Steve suspected was carefully manufactured warmth, as a young blonde guy wearing a server’s uniform approached the corner booth. Steve blinked again. The kid’s hands were _glowing._

“Barnes!” The kid’s smile seemed genuine, anyway. “Hey, I heard congratulations are in order. Is this the husband?”

Bucky fought back a pained look and put his arm around Steve. “Neighborhood gossip hasn’t changed at all. Steve, Danny. Danny, Steve.”

“Hey, Steve,” the kid said, flashing them a little wave that was clearly intended to draw attention to the glow, before flipping open a check pad, with basically the same result. “What’ll it be, the usual?”

“If you want anchovies, you’re getting them on the side,” Steve cut in, before Bucky could answer. “I don’t want them anywhere near my half of the pizza.”

“More for me,” Bucky said. “They’re delicious.”

“They’re disgusting. And that’s from somebody who grew up on Irish cooking.”

“You two are cute,” said Danny. “Regular pizza with fishies on the side it is.”

“And a pitcher of beer, whatever’s on tap,” Bucky called after him. Once Danny rounded the corner into the kitchen, he let himself roll his eyes. “That guy makes me crazy.”

“The glowing hands thing is… different,” Steve said, neutrally.

“Yeah. I’m not trying to police anybody’s self-expression, I mean, there’s no right or wrong way to be fae, but even half-dragons don’t glow like that unless they’re doing it on purpose. It’s like he’s showing off how much more fae he is than everybody else. It just rubs me the wrong way, is all. Which is my problem, not his, but it’d help if he wasn’t so…”

“Immediately and thoroughly annoying?”

“Yeah.” Bucky’s smile was real this time. “You get me, Rogers. Even when I’m being a jerk, I feel like you really get me.”

“I’d understand even better if you told me who Brock was,” Steve said pointedly.

“Oh, shit, you heard that, huh?” Bucky sighed. “Brock,” he said, “was the guy who cheated on me when I was in the hospital after my amputation.”

All things considered, it was really no surprise that Steve’s hands clenched into fists. He consciously loosened them and said, “You’re kidding me.”

“I mean, I didn’t know that at the time,” Bucky said, biting his lower lip. “I thought we were breaking up because he didn’t sign on to be with an amputee, which—I mean, it was fair, going through recovery is a lot, and there was no reason for both our lives to suck. I found out about the cheating later. In retrospect, he was always a dick, and he was borderline abusive, and he had the same kind of control issues as my mother—the truth is, I couldn’t see it because by that time, I was so used to it, I just thought that was how relationships were supposed to be. You know what really burns me about it, though? It’s not that he cheated, or that he left. It’s that he actually had me lying in a hospital bed, with a bleeding stump where my arm used to be, and somehow feeling sorry for _him,_ because I thought he was all fucked up over what happened to me. That’s how bad he managed to mess with my head.”

“Bucky,” Steve said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Eh.” Bucky shrugged, not very convincingly. “I mean, I’m not a silver-linings person by any stretch, but it was a lucky break that I found out about him before I gave him my sealskin, all things considered.”

Steve made himself breathe. It wasn’t exactly a secret that he’d been pushed around a fair amount in his lifetime, and sure, he’d wished for, longed for, the power to kick the crap out of some bullies, but he was never going to understand just what it was that made some people so broken inside that they had to leave other people shattered and bleeding in their wake. If he ever met this Brock character, he _would_ punch him in the teeth, consequences be damned. Bucky, on the other hand… Bucky hadn’t let life make him cold or cruel, even though he’d been through hell. What was the line, from that old British sci-fi show Peggy used to watch? All that suffering, and it only made him kind. “Well,” he finally said, “I may not be the man of your dreams, but at least you don’t have to worry about me cheating on you.”

“Not gonna lie, it did cross my mind that there might be one advantage to the no-sex thing.”

“So what are we gonna do about your mother?”

Bucky made a little _pfft_ sound and shook his head. “Hell if I know. In my family, the default is ‘wait for her to stop being mad, and then never talk about it again.’ But the thing is, Steve, it’s not a hundred percent her fault. She gave my dad her sealskin and it ended really badly, and after that, she was determined to make sure us kids never had to be as unhappy as she was. But life happened to all of us anyway. I lost an arm, and Becca got married way too young, to almost the first guy who came along, because she was afraid of what would happen if she didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, she seems happy enough, but she gave up a lot of her dreams to settle down with the guy. And Rachel doesn’t come home at Christmas anymore because she can’t handle all the meddling. Emily is kind of Mom’s last hope for having a normal, happy kid, and she’s going to drive her away, too, if she keeps on the way she’s going. I actually feel really sorry for her.”

“I can see that, I guess. But she was hurting you, Buck, and I couldn’t let that slide. Not after everything you’ve done for me, not when I…”

“When you what?” Bucky prompted, after a few seconds.

Steve looked up, meeting Bucky’s eyes. “I think I want to go all in on this, Bucky,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… a week ago, I would’ve said there was no chance that some stranger I met in a bar was gonna be the one. And I’m not saying you are, and I’m definitely not saying I’m ready for sex or anything—”

“Yeah, I _got_ that part, Rogers, you don’t have to keep reminding me about it.”

“—But,” Steve said, “I’m starting to feel like it’s not so ridiculous to think we could make this work.”

“Wow, qualify that a little more, pal, I’m not sure you wanna put forth such a ringing endorsement.”

“I’m trying to say that I’d like to date you, Buck. If you’re interested, I mean.”

Bucky stared at him for a moment, then laughed out loud. “So you’re saying that in addition to being my husband, you wanna be my boyfriend too?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Don’t laugh. This stuff isn’t easy for me.”

“Rogers, you’re too precious for words. And of course I want to date you, dumbass.”

“Even if we never—”

“Yes, even if I might never get to have sex with you. Jeez, Drax is right, humans really do have hang-ups.”

Steve was opening his mouth to ask who, or possibly what, Drax was, but he was interrupted by the return of Danny, glowing hands balancing a pizza pan and a stack of plates. “One large pie, extra anchovies,” he said, and laughed, as if he was the first person in history to make that joke. “Just kidding, they’re on the side. And I’ll be right back with the beer. Anything else I can get you right now?”

Bucky looked at Steve with an almost imperceptible roll of his eyes heavenward, and Steve looked back at his selkie husband, with his plate of tiny, appalling dead fish in front of him, and for the first time since Peggy, he felt like he was with someone he understood, and who really and truly understood him back. “No,” he said, and meant it when he added, “This is perfect.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys have been so kind with the comments, thank you! *blushyface*
> 
> Chapters 3 and 4 will post on 10/8!

“I can’t believe you let Natasha talk you into that,” Steve told Bucky, as the two of them walked out of the bar and turned in the direction of the the subway station.

Bucky tightened his right arm around Steve’s shoulders, pulling him closer, as if he could feel the warmth of Steve’s body right through all the layers of Steve’s heavy coat and his sealskin. He genuinely loved New York in the early part of winter, when all the decorations were up and the city was basking in fluffy white snowfalls that made everything look clean and new, but by March, the snow had clumped into piles that were as much trash and soot as hard-frozen slush, the damp air gave him a deep ache in his left shoulder that never really went away, and even Molly wouldn’t go outside unless he physically carried her to the door and dumped her into the yard. He’d told Steve his seal body didn’t mind the cold that much, and that was true, but it was a shitty time of year to be even nominally human. “Oh, now you don’t like music?” he asked.

“I love music,” Steve informed him stiffly. “Nobody likes karaoke. Anyway, it was your birthday party, so you should’ve gotten to choose the entertainment.”

“Hey, if I’d realized you hadn’t been to the Milano yet, I would’ve suggested it myself,” Bucky told him, suppressing a smile. He was pretty sure it was actually the cutest thing in the world when Steve got mad on his behalf, although Steve would be mortally offended if he ever said so. “It’s kind of a rite of passage. You might be married to a fae and de facto living with one, but you’re not really part of the community until you have to sit through some drunk Tylwyth Teg butchering ‘Princes of the Universe’ for the third time in a row.”

“I think I could’ve handled my disappointment. And what do you mean, living with one? I slept at my own place for three nights last week.”

“Only because I was at Becca’s all weekend. Look, I’m not complaining, Steve. I’m just saying I’m close enough to being a lawyer that I can get you out of your lease any time you want to make it official.”

Steve frowned, and Bucky fixed his face in a careful mask of nonchalance, pretending he wasn’t holding his breath. It couldn’t be that much of a shock to Steve that Bucky wanted to sleep next to him more than four nights out of seven. Okay, yeah, on one level having Steve as a roommate was annoying as hell. He coughed all the time, because his asthma got worse at night; and he snored, which would have been fine if he’d been willing to admit it and roll over when Bucky nudged him, instead of waking up just enough to start an argument. And, of course, there was the uncomfortable fact that Bucky’s dick tended to wake up before he did, and Steve tended to notice. It was nothing new in Bucky’s life, but Steve seemed to think it was something he needed to apologize for, as if he was leading Bucky on by mere proximity. Bucky was starting to suspect that nobody in the whole goddamn world worried about sex as much as the one guy who didn’t want it.

Mostly, though—and a few years ago, he wouldn’t have believed he’d ever lump sex into this category, but here he was—mostly, that was the small stuff, because they’d figured out so many ways to be intimate that had nothing to do with sex. Like the way they’d both started going to bed a little early so they’d have some time to talk about whatever was on their minds, or even just lie there in silence, enjoying the warmth and closeness of each other. The way he’d sometimes wake Steve by pressing a kiss to the back of his shoulder, and Steve would give the most contented little sigh, one moment of genuine peace before he woke up enough to start overthinking again. The way Steve didn’t give one single shit about whether the stump of Bucky’s left arm happened to brush up against him after he’d taken off the prosthetic, and the little frown line that appeared on his forehead when Bucky apologized for it, like it had never occurred to him that it might freak him out. That was how he wanted it to be all the time, not just on the nights he could convince Steve that he wasn’t overstaying his welcome.

Steve took a deep breath, and Bucky knew what the answer would be, and had time to smother his disappointment, before he said, “Thank you, Buck, but I’m… not ready for that yet.”

“Okay,” Bucky said, keeping his voice neutral. “Well, the offer’s on the table if you change your mind.” When Steve turned and looked hard at him, he frowned back. “Wow, you really thought I was gonna be mad, didn’t you? Obviously I was hoping you’d say yes, but I’d rather you were honest with me, even if I don’t like the answer. How come you’re always so surprised when I act like a decent person, Rogers?”

“Because people usually don’t do that with me, Barnes. I thought you would’ve noticed.”

“Well, they should,” Bucky said firmly. “Even if you do hate joy and love misery.”

“I don’t hate joy. I liked meeting Natasha’s friends tonight. They were interesting people.”

He couldn’t have been more obvious about wanting to change the subject, so Bucky resignedly tabled further discussion of moving in together and went with it. “Everybody knows ‘interesting’ means ‘I think they’re terrible, but I’m too polite to say so,’ Steve.”

“I didn’t mean that. ...Okay, Quill is a little terrible, but his girlfriend seems nice.”

“Yeah, I like Gamora. I mean, she definitely has that ‘I’ll kill you if you look at me funny’ vibe, but anybody who hangs around Natasha is used to that.” Bucky shot him a look that he hoped would come off as grudging respect, because Steve had never met a sincere compliment that he wouldn’t argue with, and said, “I was pretty impressed with how you handled Rocket.”

“Well, maybe I’ve never met a tanuki before, but,” Steve said, “I know what it’s like to be the smallest guy in the room and be maybe a little touchy about it. Oh, I meant to ask, what’s Groot’s pronoun? I didn’t want to assume.”

“‘He, him’ is fine. Dryads don’t really have a gender binary, but apparently it’s impossible to get the pronouns right anyway if you don’t have leaves. You gotta be there sometime when he performs. He doesn’t sing, but he does this light show that’s amazing.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t take a turn on the mic yourself. I know how much you love to sing.”

“Yeah, sure, in the shower. I gotta be in the right mood to do it for an audience, though.” Bucky eyed Steve speculatively. “Now I gotta ask: what’s it gonna take to get _you_ onstage?”

“Twenty-seven point eight million dollars,” Steve said.

“Okay, that’s both weirdly specific and out of my price range, but maybe we can negotiate. What are the chances you’d settle for making out in an alley?”

Bucky suspected his chances weren’t that bad, actually, but Steve glanced at his phone screen and frowned. “We don’t have time. It’s only an hour till midnight.”

“Why? Is that when you turn back into a pumpkin?”

“No, that’s when it’s your birthday and you can have your present. But we have to go to Midtown to pick it up.”

“Midtown? At this hour?” Bucky huddled down in his sealskin, glancing up towards the dark sky, which was threatening more snow before morning. “You couldn’t get it delivered?”

“Not this.”

“I’m just gonna tell you now, Steve, if you got me a puppy, I’m not saying I won’t love it, but you can deal with Molly’s tantrum when she realizes she’s not an only child anymore.”

“It’s not a puppy. Look, remember how you said you wanted to meet more of my friends?”

“Yeah, and you said I’d already met all four of them.”

“I said all four who live in Brooklyn,” Steve huffed at him in mock offense. “I can have a friend in Manhattan.”

“A friend who’s cool with us dropping in at midnight?” Bucky said, suddenly alert. New York had its fair share of humans who kept weird hours, but there were other things in the city that were bad news, and some of them only came out at night.

“Don’t worry, he’s okay,” Steve said. “He’s human, if you’re wondering. He just has trouble shutting his brain off, which is why the best time to see him is at night. I’m not gonna ruin the surprise,” he added, when Bucky opened his mouth to ask his next question. “You’ll see when we get there.”

“Don’t make me regret this, Rogers,” Bucky said, in a mock-grumble of his own, but he didn’t mean it. He’d pretty much given up pretending that he wouldn’t follow Steve anywhere.

 

“Okay,” Bucky said, looking up—and up, and up some more—at the building in front of them. “When you said we were getting off at Stark Tower, I thought you meant that was just the closest subway stop to your friend’s place, not that we were walking right the fuck up to the front door.”

“Don’t tell me you’re intimidated,” Steve said, fishing a pair of security badges out of his jacket and holding one out to Bucky. “You’re the one who’s going to be a big fancy lawyer.”

“A fae lawyer, sure, but that’s a niche market. I’ll never be the kind of shark that gets on the Stark Industries payroll. Anyway, I’m not sure it’s such a great idea for me to go in there. You might not know this, but SI is kinda quietly off-limits to fae.”

“If that were true, it would be illegal discrimination,” Steve said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, because I’m gonna be a kickass lawyer, I know that, but you can make a place really damn uncomfortable for somebody without technically breaking the law. I also know,” Bucky said pointedly, “that ever since Tony Stark took his unplanned Summerlands vacation a couple years ago, he’s had it in for us fae so bad that people call him the _Iron Man.”_

Steve reached up and put his hands on Bucky’s shoulders. “You’re the one who’s always telling me to check my assumptions about the fae,” he said. “Bucky, right now I’m asking you to check your assumptions about humans. Please.”

Bucky wasn’t convinced, but he took the badge and followed Steve across the lobby, swiping it over the scanner—and if he made a quiet, contemptuous noise when he walked through the metal detector, Steve either didn’t notice or decided to ignore it. He led Bucky over to the elevators, where, instead of punching a button, he laid his hand on a second scanner.

“Welcome, Steve Rogers and guest,” a voice said over the speakers as the doors slid open, and Bucky jumped about three feet.

Steve grinned. “That’s Jarvis,” he said. “Hi, Jarvis.”

“Always a pleasure to see you, sir.”

“You’re on a first-name basis with the elevator?” Bucky said, stepping inside and bracing himself against the rail. He managed to keep it pretty well under wraps most of the time, but even before the accident, he hadn’t exactly loved being surrounded on all four sides by metal.

“Jarvis is an artificial intelligence,” Steve said, unruffled. _“You_ turn into an aquatic mammal.”

“Together we fight crime?”

“I’m just saying that Jarvis isn’t the weirdest thing in my life right now. No offense, Jarvis.”

“None taken, sir,” Jarvis said calmly, as the doors slid open.

Bucky barely managed not to yelp when the saw where the elevator had taken them, but his right hand clutched the rail hard enough that it hurt. The room was a massive laboratory full of computer equipment and high-tech-looking tools, most of them made of gleaming metal. Every signal in his brain was pinging _danger, danger, danger,_ and he didn’t realize how close he was to bolting until he felt Steve’s hand between his shoulder blades, steadying him.

“Hey,” he said, “I know it’s uncomfortable. But I promise, it’s going to be worth it.”

Bucky shut his eyes, forcing himself to take a slow breath in and let it out again before he opened them. _C’mon, Barnes, don’t be a wimp,_ he told himself, and then, _Don’t be like Mom,_ which worked a little better. He’d been expecting the worst for so long that sometimes it felt like fear was woven into his fucking DNA, but considering he’d already survived losing both an arm and a sealskin, he had no excuse to keep being scared all the time. Steve, weirdly enough, had actually been pretty helpful in that regard. Not just because he was a reckless little fuck, although he was, but because being around him made Bucky feel, for the first time in a long time, like maybe there were things worth taking chances for.

He didn’t have time to dwell on it, though, because somebody was moving out from behind a workbench, with a welding mask over his face and a blowtorch in one hand. “Glad you two finally made it, because, Lucy, you got some ‘splainin’ to do,” he called, in Steve’s direction, and then he pushed back the mask and Bucky’s jaw dropped.

“You know _Tony Stark?”_ he said, rounding on Steve.

“Yeah,” Steve said, as if there was nothing that unusual about a broke-ass graphic designer strolling into the laboratory of a genius billionaire.

“You know him _personally?_ Like, stupid-nicknames-level personally?”

“To be fair, he does the thing with the pop culture references to everyone,” Steve said. “Look, I know you probably feel like I sprung this on you, but I knew you wouldn’t come if I—”

“Are you telling me,” Bucky said, very slowly, “that you’re buddies with like the seventeenth richest human in the world and somehow you still live in that shithole of an apartment?”

“See, that’s exactly what I said!” Stark tossed the helmet aside and came toward them, and Bucky planted his feet, willing himself not to hunch down into his sealskin and try to disappear. He and Stark sized each other up for maybe five seconds, just long enough to make the silence good and awkward between them, and then Stark abruptly nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, Rogers, I see it. Gun to my head, if I had to pick a dude, et cetera, but I’ll admit that you could’ve made a worse choice in the looks department.”

“It wasn’t a—” Bucky started to say, but he cut himself off quickly. If Steve hadn’t seen fit to fill Stark in on the details of their relationship, that was his call. “How do you two know each other?”

“Funny story,” Stark began.

“It’s not that funny,” Steve said. “Remember I told you about my cousin Virginia?”

“Yeah, sure, the only family you—wait. Is your cousin Virginia _Potts?_ As in Pepper Potts, the CFO of Stark Industries? That was a hell of a thing not to mention!”

“I never tell anyone I’m related to Pepper until I know I can really trust them,” Steve said, giving Bucky a long, significant look. “We’re both the only family the other one has left, which means people could use me to get to her. I’m not going to make it easy for anyone else to hurt her.”

“Or yourself, I fucking hope,” Bucky said, although he really wasn’t optimistic on that front. “Okay, tell me this funny-not-funny story.”

“You might’ve heard about the gang of Unseelie that pulled a Taken on me, couple years back,” Stark began. Seeing Bucky’s expression, he clapped him on the shoulder and added, “Relax, Tam Lin, my beef isn’t with you. Point is, Pepper had a pretty bad time while I was MIA, and Rogers here was one of the people who got her through it.”

“I only did what anybody would have,” Steve said, while Bucky digested this new information. Seeing Stark up close for the first time, Bucky could see that the Summerlands had left their mark on him. There were faint streaks of gray in his hair and beard that must have been Photoshopped out of the most recent round of press releases, but the real difference was in his eyes—a careful, wary look Bucky recognized because he’d seen it in the mirror. Stark had only been missing for a couple of months, but for him, it might have felt like a hell of a lot longer. “I just kept an eye on her and let her vent when she needed to, that’s all.”

“Not the way Pepper tells it. She credits this guy with single-handedly saving her sanity. Then I came home. I’d never seen Pepper cry before that day—and of course, at that exact second, we got mobbed by reporters. One of them stuck a camera in Pepper’s face and started talking about her so-called ‘public meltdown,’ and Steve here—”

“Look,” Steve said, “I don’t like bullies, okay? I don’t care whether they have press passes.”

“How many guys did you punch?” Bucky asked flatly.

“Three,” said Steve.

“Six,” said Tony.

“If that’s true, how come only three signed the police report? Besides, I didn’t really hurt anyone, and the fight made all the footage unusable, so,” Steve shrugged, “win.”

“If you can call a bloody nose and a restraining order ‘winning,’” Stark said, before his voice took a surprising swing toward sincerity. “The point is, Steve was there for the woman I love when I couldn’t be. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to figure out some way to return the favor in a way that doesn’t set off his oversensitive moral compass.”

“Get him out of that shitty job where they don’t appreciate how talented he is,” Bucky suggested.

“I had one lined up,” Stark said, raising his hands helplessly. “Art director for an SI subsidiary, would’ve been right up his alley. He turned me down.”

“I like my job,” Steve said, the frown line reappearing. “And I don’t need charity. When I move up at work, it’ll be because I earned it, not because I got something handed to me.”

“That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard,” Bucky said. “A genuine billionaire offers you your dream job and you won’t take it because, what, you got something to prove? ”

“That’s the _other_ thing I said!” Stark gestured vaguely in Steve’s direction: _Can you believe this guy?_ “Sometimes I want to punch him right in the ethics. Anyway, imagine my surprise when he tells me he’s finally ready to call in the favor, not for himself, God forbid, but for his brand new shiny surprise husband. So, _voila,”_ he said, sweeping his arm toward one of the tables. “Although I still don’t think this makes us even. Jarvis has been running the numbers, and we think fae-friendly medical equipment could turn out to be a huge untapped market.”

“Don’t get too optimistic,” Steve warned him. “You may have some trust to rebuild before fae are willing to buy your product.”

“Good thing I’ve got Hubby here to be the very handsome face of the new initiative, then. Go ahead, Barnes, take a look.”

Still reeling from the craziness of the whole situation, Bucky steeled himself, metaphorically speaking, and cautiously approached the work table. He stared for a long moment, then turned to Stark. “This is for me?”

Stark snorted. “You see anyone else around here who’s short an arm, pal?”

Bucky picked up the new prosthetic from the table, holding it in his right hand and resting it across his clunky plastic one. He’d looked into just about every adaptive device on the market, and at a glance, the matte-gray arm in front of him looked like a typical high-end model, with smoothly articulated joints and interlocking plates that slotted tightly together. What was weird was that it was completely missing the prickly, sunburn-like feeling he usually got when he touched anything that held more metal than a computer chip. “What’s it made of?”

“Mostly lightweight plastic and carbon-fiber composites,” Stark said. “Still had to use a little metal here and there, but I think I came up with a shielding material that’ll do the trick.” He rapped on the forearm, which made a hollow, knocking sound. “The shell is made of cellulose nanocrystals, which come from—any guesses from the peanut gallery?”

“Wood,” Bucky said, staggered. “You made the most high-tech wooden arm in history.”

“Wood,” Stark confirmed, looking pleased. “Made sure we got the traditional oak, ash, and thorn in there, too, in case that matters to you. Speaking of commercial applications, that’s something I should’ve thought of years ago, because—”

“Let him try it, Tony,” Steve said.

“Right, right. Matter at hand, so to speak. Go ahead, Barnes, put it on.”

Bucky only hesitated for a moment, but Steve noticed and quickly moved forward, sliding the sealskin off Bucky’s shoulders and onto his own for safekeeping. Bucky shot him a grateful glance before he stripped off his shirt, and then the old prosthetic, setting it on the workbench. The new one was wonderfully light, and it slotted perfectly over the stump of his arm on the first try, snug and secure without being too tight. “How’d you make make it fit so well without taking any measurements?” he asked.

“Well, I _am_ a genius,” Stark pointed out.

“Jarvis made a 3D model from about a hundred pictures of the old one I took while you were in the shower,” Steve said.

“That too. Try making a fist. No, I meant with the left hand, pal. You want to—yep, there it is.”

Bucky jumped about two feet when the fingers of the prosthetic contracted all at once. “I thought you had to program these things first,” he said, turning it over in awe.

“Sure, if it was made by Roxxon or Hammer,” Stark said contemptuously. “My tech learns by doing. Try it again.”

Bucky did. He had to rest the new arm against the table and repeat the process half a dozen times before he could close all five fingers consistently, but this device already had a hundred times more utility than the old one. In theory, he knew what was happening: prosthetics like this had sensors that picked up tiny muscle twitches in what was left of his arm, sending signals down circuits to simulate natural movements. Still, if somebody had come along and told him magic was involved, he would have believed it. “You telling me you somehow built a myoelectric socket with so little metal in it that it’s basically undetectable?” he asked.

“That’s right. Airport security won’t even blink. I’m impressed, Barnes, you know your mechanics. Try bending the elbow.”

Bucky did, and watched with fascination as the joint flexed with a faint mechanical hum. “I just like knowing out how stuff works, I guess,” he said, in response to Stark’s implicit question. “For a while when I was a kid I thought I was gonna grow up to be a structural engineer, but it turns out it kind of helps your chances if you can be around steel girders without puking and passing out.”

“Yep, Steve mentioned that even nonferrous metals do a number on you sometimes. I’m guessing that takes osseointegration off the table.”

“Heh. I fucking _wish_ I could get a titanium implant. The shit they can do with those nowadays—”

“Do you like it, Bucky?” Steve asked.

Bucky turned back to Steve—who looked adorably concerned about how the gift was going over, as if this wasn’t the most amazing fucking thing anybody had done for Bucky in his entire life—and reached out to pull him into a hug. It was a little clunky, sure, but so much better than letting the old prosthetic dangle at his side. He’d _missed_ this. “Listen, punk,” he said, “I love this arm. I’ve had it for like two minutes and I will cut anyone who tries to take it from me. But next time you have a choice between my birthday present and your dream job, take the fucking job, okay?”

“No promises,” Steve said, and Bucky let himself smile at that before he turned back to Stark.

“I’ve got some questions—”

“And I want to see you put this thing through its paces before I release it into the wild,” Stark said. “Rogers, go grab the last piece off the 3D printer, will you? It’s in the downstairs lab, Jarvis will tell you where.”

Steve opened his mouth—Bucky suspected he was on the verge of a _what’s the magic word,_ because this was Steve, after all—but he thought better of it and headed for the elevator. Bucky knew an excuse when he saw one, but he couldn’t have said exactly what he was expecting to follow it, which was why it came as a hell of a surprise when Stark sized him up one more time, eyes narrowed just slightly, and said, “Just tell me this, Barnes. Will you make him happy?”

Bucky looked back at him warily. “What?”

“You heard me.” Stark picked up a screwdriver and flipped it end over end a couple of times, and Bucky honestly didn’t know if that was supposed to be a fidget or a threat. It was only then that he realized Steve had walked off with his sealskin—unintentionally, of course; awareness of the skin wasn’t hardwired into Steve, and he couldn’t understand how naked Bucky felt without it to hide in. He tried—Bucky was constantly amazed by how hard he tried—but he was only human.

“Look,” Stark said, clearly winding up to speechify again, “me and Rogers, we don’t always see eye to eye. If Pepper hadn’t made it clear that getting along with him was a dealbreaker, I wouldn’t have given him the time of day. But Rogers has turned out to be, and you have no idea how much it pains me to say this, probably the highest-quality person I’ve ever met in my life. So as glad as I am that he finally got over the whole asexuality business, I don’t—”

“Wait, what?” Bucky interrupted.

“Oh, yeah, couple years in there he was telling Pepper he quit dating because he didn’t like sex. Didn’t see the point of it, he said.” Stark rolled his eyes. “Anybody who doesn’t like it is doing it wrong, if you ask me. Anyway, obviously the two of you have figured something out. My point is, I’m sure there was a good reason he sprung a surprise husband on Pepper before he even told her he was dating again after his… hiatus. But you can see where somebody who cares about the guy might sleep better if they knew why the two of you were in such a rush.”

Bucky blinked, trying to figure out if Stark actually didn’t know how offensive it was to suggest that he’d put some kind of love spell on Steve, or if he just didn’t care. He made himself breathe deeply before he answered. “Did Steve tell you what kind of fae I am?” he asked.

“According to him, and this is a direct quote, ‘the stupid overprotective jerk kind,” Stark said, which startled a small laugh out of Bucky in spite of himself. “But beyond the fact that you weren’t Unseelie, he didn’t go into detail. Is it relevant?”

Bucky had spent too much time being both fae and in law school to answer that. “The important thing is that I’m not the _really_ magical kind,” he said. “Look, St—hell. What do I call you?”

“Tony’s fine,” said Stark. “Hey You, Genius, and Merchant of Death are also acceptable.”

“Right. Well, Tony, here’s the thing. I wasn’t exactly looking for a partner when I met Steve. The truth…” The truth was a minefield and Bucky was going to have to plant his feet very carefully within it, but he was used to that, too. “The truth is,” he said, meeting Tony’s eyes, “over the last couple years, I kind of gave up. Not on life, but on people. I had some stuff happen to me that really fucked with my head, and after that, I mostly wanted to be left alone. I wasn’t looking for somebody to come along and change my life. But Steve… Steve _cares,_ is the thing. We’ve both seen what a shitty place the world can be, but where most people would go, ‘Fuck this, I’m out,’ he thinks it’s his job to remind it to get back on track. He made me remember a time when I used to believe in people like that, and he makes me think I can get back there again. That’s the thing that made me give this relationship a shot, and that’s the reason I plan to stick around for as long as he’ll have me. I honestly don’t know if I can make Steve happy, but he believes in me, and I’m gonna do my damnedest to live up to that.”

Stark looked hard at him for several seconds, and it was one of the harder things Bucky had ever done to stand there, feeling completely exposed in every way, and not back down under that cold-eyed gaze. And then, once again, Stark’s whole manner changed, all the aggression leaving his posture. “Right,” he said. “Okay. I’m noting for the record that you still haven’t answered a lot of my questions, Barnes. But you don’t seem like you glamored or geased my friend, so I have to assume he’s with you out of his own free will.”

Bucky allowed himself a tiny smirk at that. “If you think Steve would’ve needed magic to do something stupid, then you don’t know him as well as you think you do,” he said.

Stark burst into a surprisingly loud, appreciative laugh just as the elevator dinged open again, admitting Steve to the lab. He opened his mouth to ask, then shook his head. “I’ll just assume that was at my expense and I don’t want to know. Tony, is this what you were after?”

“Yeah, hand it over,” Stark said, with just enough emphasis on the word _hand_ that Bucky had to suppress a groan. Bad puns were supposed to be his prerogative, not some able-bodied asshole’s. But the thing Steve had brought him was actually hand-shaped. It looked like a glove until Stark started to roll it over the fingers of the new arm, and then he realized it was a thin silicone sleeve precisely the color of his skin.

“Goes on just like a condom,” he observed, and Steve, hilariously, blushed. “This just for looks, or does it protect the machinery too?”

“Under ordinary circumstances, the machinery won’t need protecting,” Stark said, an edge of contempt in his voice. “I don’t build anything that can’t catch a bullet, much less stand up to everyday wear. This is just waterproofing.”

“What?”

“Rogers said that would be important to you,” Stark went on, stretching the sleeve over the elbow joint. “I wouldn’t take it deep sea diving, but get some waterproof first-aid tape, make a nice tight seal between the top edge and your skin, and you should be able to spend an hour or two in the pool without a problem. ...Barnes. You with me, buddy?”

Bucky had sat down hard on a stool by the workbench. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. I just… wow. I don’t know what to say, Tony.”

Stark shrugged. “You’re my alpha tester, so you’re doing me the favor, really. Give it a good workout. Take notes, tell me how to improve it when I build Version Two. Don’t worry about sparing my feelings, I don’t have any. And you,” he addressed Steve, “call Pepper and let her take you to lunch. For some reason she worries when you disappear for a month and suddenly turn up married, and _I’m_ the one who hears about it. Now, both of you get out. I’ve got a video call with the Tokyo office in fifteen minutes, and there’s a car downstairs waiting to take you two back to Brooklyn.”

Bucky was still in such a state of shock that he barely heard Steve saying his goodbyes to Stark, or to the AI in the elevator. He spent the whole elevator ride turning his arm so he could admire the prosthetic from different angles, reveling in the fact that he was already figuring out how to flex the fingers individually, and he didn’t realize how long he’d been gazing at it until they were in the back seat of the Towncar—it _had_ to be amazing if he’d barely noticed he was getting into a car he wasn’t driving—when Steve finally said, “If you’re mad at me, Buck, you can say so.”

“What?” Bucky looked  at him in shock. “No! Steve, I… I just can’t believe it, is all. Why the fuck would I be mad at you for giving me the most incredible gift of my life?”

Steve’s shoulders drooped with relief. “Good,” he said. “I was getting worried that Tony said something horrible to you while I was gone.”

“Oh, that? No, it was just your run-of-the-mill shovel talk,” Bucky said. When Steve looked at him blankly, he elaborated, “You know, ‘my friend Steve is a precious cinnamon roll and if you hurt him, I’ll beat you to death with a shovel,’ that kind of thing.”

“He said that?” Steve said, bristling.

“Not in so many words, but the gist was there. Don’t worry, I’m not mad. I kind of respect him for it, actually, even though he isn’t very good at it. I have three little sisters; I could’ve given him pointers. There’s one thing I should tell you, though. He thinks us being married means you’re not on the ace spectrum anymore.”

Steve tensed. “What did you do?”

“Let him think so. I don’t give a shit what anybody thinks we do in bed, but I wasn’t sure if you would. I’ll go back and tell him off if you want me to, though. He doesn’t get to be the sexuality police, I don’t care if he is a billionaire genius playboy philanthropist.”

“No, I’m glad you didn’t say anything. Thank you.” Steve drew a deep shaky breath that, for once, had nothing to do with his asthma. “It’s not that I need you to stick up for me. I can fight my own battles. I’m just really tired of having that argument with people, and with Tony in particular.”

“What argument?”

“You know. The one where you tell people you think you might be on the ace spectrum and they start psychoanalyzing you. ‘Asexuality doesn’t exist, you’re just repressed from being raised Catholic.’ ‘You’re in denial about being gay, so you convinced yourself you don’t want it with anyone.’ ‘You just aren’t dating the right kinds of people.’ ‘You can’t be bi and ace, you have to pick one.’ ‘Sex is a basic human need and if you don’t want it, there’s something wrong with you.’”

Bucky sighed. “Steve,” he said, “of course there’s something wrong with you.”

“What?” Steve said, his voice low.

Bucky fought down a smile, because that was the quintessential Steve Rogers right there: running himself down all the livelong day, but ready to fight the second he thought someone else was trying it. “A lot of things, actually,” he said. “I mean, your lungs are shit, your spine’s a mess, you’re pretty much allergic to the entire planet, and even your dumb red blood cells are all fucked up. And that’s just the physical stuff. We haven’t even talked about the big one, which is your incurable case of stupid. Notice what I didn’t put on that list, though?”

“My sexuality,” Steve said, looking resigned and skeptical all at once.

“Your sexuality,” Bucky confirmed. “I get that your identity’s complicated, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid as hell. Look, as far as I can tell, you’re a biromantic demisexual. I’m a guy who turns into a seal and swims around the harbor.”

The corner of Steve’s mouth twitched. “Together we fight crime?”

“Damn skippy we do. Anyway, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter, Steve, because if you care about it, I care about it. But what I care about _more_ is that you’re the kind of person who stands up to Natasha when you think she’s meddling in a way that could hurt somebody, and who turns down a cushy job because you don’t want to take advantage of your rich friend—”

“—Which you just told me _at length_ was stupid,” Steve pointed out.

“Things can be stupid and still be kind of admirable, in a dumb way. And you’re also the type of person who winds up stuck in an accidental marriage to a traumatized amputee with massive family issues, and instead of immediately hating him forever, you not only give that guy a shot, you figure out a way to get him an awesome new prosthetic and give him back his favorite hobby, which he thought he had to give up forever. That’s the kind of thing that makes me fall in love with a person, Steve, not whether they want me to put my dick in them.”

Steve looked across the seat at him with wide eyes. “Did you just say you love me?” he said.

“Well,” Bucky said, “yeah, I guess I kind of did. I love you, Steve Rogers,” he said, testing the words and finding out that they sounded true. “But don’t feel like you have to say it back or anything. Like I said, I’d rather you were honest.”

“I know,” Steve said, reaching out to slip his hand into Bucky’s—the right hand, of course, because as good as the prosthetic was, there was no substitute for being able to hold someone’s hand and feel it. “You know, I don’t feel like I’ve earned you, either,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

“The same way I didn’t feel like I’d earned the job Tony wanted to give me. I only get to be with you because of a magical accident. It feels like cheating.”

“Oh, fuck that noise.”

“I’m telling you how I feel,” Steve said, jutting out his chin in the way that meant he was prepared to dig in his heels, and no amount of logic would change his mind. “That’s what you said you wanted.”

“Okay, but just because I said I don’t mind you being complicated, it doesn’t mean you have to _make_ everything complicated, Rogers. I know I’m the one who said magic always fucks up more than it fixes, but maybe I’m wrong. Who knows, maybe it even owed me something and you turned out to be the payback.”

“What does that mean?” Steve asked, puzzled.

“It means… a lot of complicated stuff that I’m not really ready to get into in the back of a car at one in the fucking morning. Could I just take you home and hug you until I either wear this arm out or fall asleep doing it?”

Steve let himself smile. “Well, if that’s how you want to spend your birthday,” he said, “then I guess I’m fine with that.”

 

It was a gorgeous day in April, and Bucky was in Prospect Park, tossing a football around with Barton and stopping, every couple of minutes, to remind himself that he wasn’t dreaming: he was actually tossing a football around with Barton, and he was having _fun_ again.

Oh, he could have been doing this all along, he guessed—not the football part, but the going-outdoors-with-friends part. Sure, the new prosthetic helped a fucking _ton_ with his ability to do anything beyond basically functioning, but it wasn’t like losing his arm had resulted in the state of New York revoking his happiness license, or in all of his friends disowning him; if anything, they’d been making more of an effort to be there for him. He was the one who hadn’t been able to accept it. He’d been coasting along out of habit for years now, like something out of a ghost story, existing without really living. And now, all of a sudden, he and Steve were dragging each other out of their shells, spurring each other on to do _better._ Just that morning, Steve had commented on the gorgeous weather and pointedly asked when Bucky was going to take Clint up on his offer to give the new arm a real workout, and Bucky had replied that he was only going out if Steve came along and brought his sketchbook, and now he was playing catch, and Steve was sitting under a tree doing speed sketches of Natasha while she bent her yoga-agile body into interesting pretzel shapes to challenge him, and none of that was especially miraculous unless you knew that, left to their own devices, probably neither he nor Steve would have gotten out in the sunshine at all.

“Hey, Barnes, go long,” Clint yelled at him, and Bucky snapped to attention as Clint lofted the football over his head. He dashed after it, so focused on the fact that he could raise both hands to catch it that he forgot to look where he was going, caught his foot on one of the paving stones that bordered the lake, and went sprawling, his momentum carrying him straight down into the water.

“Buck,” Steve shouted, scrambling to his feet—which was gratifying, in a way, because it meant Steve had been keeping one eye on him instead of focusing on his sketches. Clint just burst into hysterical laughter. “Oh my God, Barnes,” he said, scrambling over the rocks to fish Bucky out of the shallows. “That was too perfect. I wish I’d gotten it on video.”

Bucky reached out his right hand as if he was going to let Clint pull him up. Then, at the last second, he yanked as hard as he could, sending Clint sprawling beside him into the sandy lake bed. Clint came up sputtering and glaring like a drenched cat, while Bucky shoved his dripping hair back from his face and tried not to die laughing. “Goddammit, Barnes, that wasn’t funny, mine wasn’t on purpose, I didn’t—” His face took on an expression of real dismay as he fished a sodden phone out of his pocket. “Aw, phone, no. I thought I was actually gonna keep this one long enough to get the upgrade, for once.”

“Shit. Sorry,” Bucky said. His own phone was safe in Steve’s messenger bag, along with his wallet and house keys, because like most people, he’d quickly learned to limit the damages around Barton. Sadly, Barton couldn’t _not_ keep his stuff around Barton.

“Not your fault,” Clint said resignedly. “Hey, Nat? You still got that buddy at the Apple store?”

“You mean Aaron?” Natasha called back. “The one you told I was your fiancée and we were there to look up honeymoon destinations when you were actually hacking the NYPD database? Not your best plan, Clint.”

“It was your plan, Nat!” Clint shouted back at her. Bucky turned to stare at him, and he shrugged. “It was for work.”

“We might buy that if you’d tell anybody what it is that you do, Clint,” Steve said, jogging up behind Natasha. “But since you won’t—”  

“No, no, I want him to keep talking,” Bucky said. “Because eventually he’s gonna remember that he’s talking to a lawyer, and then he’ll have to put me on retainer to get attorney-client privilege.”

“You wanna go back in the water, Barnes? Because I can arrange it,” Clint said, giving Bucky a halfhearted shove.

“Ha!” Bucky said, when he stumbled and splashed but ultimately kept his feet. “Joke’s on you, asshole. Water’s my natural fucking habitat, which means you can’t scare me with—oh _shit,_ there’s a swan. Help!”

At least the fact that Clint yelped and joined him in running away made the whole thing marginally less embarrassing. Well, that and the fact that even Natasha backed up when the bird gave its threat display, showing off every inch of what had to be a seven-foot wingspan. “I’m sorry,” Bucky shouted at it, once he judged he was far enough from the water. “We won’t get up in your face again, I promise, okay?”

“Are you really apologizing to a bird?” Steve said—not that he hadn’t also had the good sense to retreat to a safe distance, Bucky noticed.

“Fuck yes I’m apologizing to a bird, and you wouldn’t think it was funny if you had any idea what happens to people who fuck with swan maidens.”

“What makes you think she’s a swan maiden?” Steve asked.

“The question you want to be asking is, what makes you think she isn’t?” Crisis averted, Bucky walked back to where they’d left their stuff, giving the pond a wide berth. He dug into Steve’s messenger bag for his phone, feeling that little metallic prickle under his skin, like always, when he closed his hand around it—one of these days, he’d be good enough with the prosthetic to make it do all the work and save him the discomfort, which was a damn faint silver lining to losing an arm, but he’d take what he could get—and tapped in his passcode, which was definitely a random series of numbers and not the anniversary of his and Steve’s accidental marriage. Then his eyes landed on the first missed text, and he froze.

“Shit,” he said. “Guys, I gotta go. It’s Emily.”

 

“We’re okay,” Emily said, when Bucky crashed into the chair beside her at the coffee shop, but he was pretty sure she was saying it for Kamala’s sake, not for his, and not because it was true. She was hugging her coat to her chest in a way that was painfully familiar to Bucky, even though it was a plain jean jacket and not her sealskin. “Nobody got hurt.”

“Tell me,” Bucky said, turning on his interviewing-a-witness voice.

“We weren’t even doing anything,” Kamala said. Her expression was hovering somewhere between angry and nauseated, but he thought the anger was winning, which was good. Anger could keep a person going where fear would make them stop. “We were just walking around. We shouldn’t have to pretend we’re not fae when we’re just _walking around.”_

“All she did was make herself a little taller to look at something in a store window,” Emily said. “After that, these guys started following us—”

“How many?” Bucky asked.

“Three. They were calling Kamala—” Emily hesitated, and finished, “—names. Neither of us said anything back, we just tried to leave, but one of them grabbed her arm and I got scared, so I pushed him—”

“Jesus, Em,” Bucky said, less because he was upset with her for escalating a fight than because he was just now realizing that his three favorite people—Nat, Steve, and now Emily—all fell into the category of tiny, pugnacious jerks. Apparently he really did have a type.

“And I was so surprised that I disembiggened by accident,” Kamala said, miserably.

“You did what now?”

“Shrunk herself down,” Emily translated. “Just a little—to eighty percent of normal, maybe. But he grabbed her bracelet, and it came off in his hand.”

“Then I realized what I was doing and got bigger instead,” Kamala continued, “and then they ran off. I didn’t even notice the bracelet was missing until they were gone.” She looked down at her bare wrist. “That bracelet was my grandma’s. My mom brought it with her when she came here from Karachi. I know it’s just a thing, but it’s a thing I can’t replace. I don’t know how I’m gonna tell Ammi I lost it.”

“Hang on, kiddo. Let’s not panic yet. You get a good look at the guys? Think you could give a description to the police?”

“Yeah, they’ll just jump at the chance to hunt down three young white human males wearing baseball caps,” Emily said, with a cynicism beyond her not-quite-sixteen years.

“Right, enough said. Okay, so the police are plan B. Plan A is, you two are gonna go home with Steve, and he’s gonna call Mom and tell them we ran into you at the park and invited you over for dinner.”

“What are you gonna do?” Emily asked.

Bucky looked across the table at her, and the memory of the first time he’d met Kamala rose up to the surface of his mind. He’d been eighteen, nominally in charge of the household while his mom and Bec were away at a swim match, when the call came that Emily had been in a fight. He’d raced over to the school, sick with worry, thinking somebody had come after her for being fae, the way human kids had occasionally come after him behind the bleachers at recess. But when he got there, he found Emily and a little Pakistani girl sitting back to back in the principal’s office, arms crossed and backs straight, both of them openly defiant. His shock had only increased as the vice principal had told him flatly that _your sister and Ms. Khan here_ had pounced on one of their classmates—he didn’t say the classmate in question was human, but he sure as hell managed to _communicate_ it—and started pounding him into the dirt.

Then Kamala had clenched her little fists—little because she was a child; she wouldn’t come into her shapeshifting powers for a few years yet—and shouted, “That’s not true!” And the story that spilled out of her wasn’t about her and Emily at all, but about a new kid in their class who’d been bullied and shunned since he came to the school. After one especially nasty episode on the playground reduced him to tears, Kamala Khan had had enough. She’d taken a swing at the real aggressor, and Emily had jumped in to support her, because Kamala’s response had convinced her that justice needed to be done.

Bucky had listened to both sides, sincerely, and he’d thanked the vice principal for calling him and told him that he’d make sure the situation was handled appropriately. Then he’d taken both girls to a Disney matinee and stuffed them full of ice cream, because Emily wasn’t the only Barnes who had principles, thanks very much. At some point, he’d asked the girls if the new kid was fae, if that was why they’d felt a need to protect him. Both of them had looked at him blankly, over sundaes covered in gummy bears, and said they didn’t know. “Why?” Emily had said, wrinkling her nose. “Does it matter?” And Bucky had said no, because he hadn’t had the heart to tell them that it _shouldn’t_ matter, but of course, in the real world, it did.

Emily had lost a lot of innocence as time went on, and Bucky was saddened but not surprised; it was just a thing that happened in the process of growing up, maybe a little faster if you had a mother who never quit hammering the general danger and wickedness of the world into your head. But Kamala had remained the kind of kid who leaped to the rescue when someone else needed a champion. Bucky had been waiting for it to wear off for her, too, until he met Steve. That was when he’d realized that whether it was through faith or magic or maybe just good old pigheaded insanity, some people managed to go into adulthood still believing that the universe ultimately bent toward justice, even if they had to lean on it now and again to keep it that way. And if Bucky even had a chance to help tip the balance, to keep Kamala more like Steve than like him, well. He knew which way he wanted her to go.

“I’m going to take matters into my own hands,” he said grimly.

 

It was a terrible idea, and Steve would’ve told him so if he’d known any of the particulars, which was why Bucky didn’t tell him anything except that he was going to talk to some people and see if there was anything he could do. He’d promised not to lie to Steve, but he hadn’t promised to spill every thought to him, either. Humans had figured out enough about omission to put that line about telling the whole truth in their courtroom oaths, but fae were fucking born to it.

Jessica met him in a parking lot, wearing her traditional uniform of black leather jacket, jeans over motorcycle boots, and assorted scarves around her neck. If he was honest with himself, her ability to pull off that aggressive “I’m not a fucking hipster, it’s just cold” look was probably sixty percent of why he’d overlooked all the drinking and property damage while they were dating, before he got his head far enough out of his ass to realize he’d lose his shot at law school if he kept showing up to class late and hungover.

The other forty percent was that the sex was mind-blowing, but he was trying not to think about that.

“So what did you lose?” she called out to him, as soon as he was close enough to hear. “Your spine or your balls? You’re obviously missing one or the other, since you haven’t called me in five years.”

“Maeve’s sake, Jones, this is a business proposition,” Bucky said, before he realized that sounded even dirtier. “My little sister’s friend got hassled by some guys who took a bracelet from her, a family heirloom. I want you to locate the guys and the bracelet. How much?”

“Depends. You want the guys roughed up when we find them?”

“If I say yes to that, it’s conspiracy to commit assault,” Bucky said, trying to match the complete lack of concern in her voice. “And if I say ‘we’ll see,’ there’s a case for premeditation, so how ’bout I don’t say anything and we’re both happy?”

“Fuck me,” Jessica said. “How do I keep getting mixed up with lawyers? The fee’s seven hundred.”

“Seven hundred _dollars?_ You’re out of your mind. This is gonna take a couple of hours, tops.”

“Fine, for you I’ll make it five, but it goes up to eight if we have to go to Jersey.”

“Fair,” Bucky said. Five hundred was already a stretch for his budget, but if they had to go to Jersey, money would be the least of his problems. “What do you need?”

“Let’s start with a picture of the bracelet, if you have one.”

Bucky held out his phone, the screen showing the day-old selfie Emily had texted him. She and Kamala were flashing peace signs at the camera, and the gold bracelet was clearly visible. Jessica didn’t take it immediately, and several seconds passed before he realized she was unabashedly staring at his new prosthetic. “You wanna stare or you wanna get paid?” he said, before he realized that sounded filthy, too.

“Kinda wanna stare,” Jessica said bluntly, before she looked up at him. “Tough break, Barnes.”

“Shit happens,” he said, keeping his voice as neutral as he could.

“You know, I heard you got fucked up in an accident, but I don’t think I ever heard the whole story.”

“And you never will,” he said. “If you want your money, we better get moving.”

Jessica glared at him—or maybe she just looked at him; she definitely had resting glare face. But then she turned her attention to the photo, gazing at it for long enough that a human probably would have asked what was going on. Bucky waited, staying very still, until she raised her head. “Got a lock on the kids,” she said, handing the phone back to him. “Nothing on the bracelet yet, but if we’re lucky, we’ll find them both at once.”

Just at that moment, the phone buzzed in his hand: _Incoming call from Steve Rogers._ Bucky only hesitated for a moment before tapped the Decline button and said, “Let’s go.”

 

Jessica’s tracking abilities had never let Bucky down yet. The building she led him to was a shitty walkup overrun with college students, and Bucky imagined they probably considered themselves pretty cool and defiant to live in a disgusting place, breaking the maximum occupancy rules, playing their thumping bass music at all hours and scattering beer cans in the halls and sweet Titania, when had he gotten so old and grumpy? Jessica, on the other hand, grinned as she approached a door draped with a huge flag printed with a multicolored pot leaf. “Just like the old days,” she said. “Hey, remember the time we broke your bed?”

“No,” Bucky lied, raising his right hand and rapping on the door.

The kid who opened the door was a type Bucky thought of as Classic Douchebag: a young, tanned, muscled-up gym rat wearing a white tank top and a backwards baseball cap, probably had a name like Chad or Trent or something. Bucky put his age closer to twenty-one than the seventeen or eighteen he’d been expecting, which meant that, in legal terms, the guys who’d hassled his sister were grown-ass men. At that thought, something ugly and bitter rose up inside him, crawling out of the shadows of what a therapist would call his psyche and Steve would call his soul, and before he even knew what he meant to do, he shoved his way into the apartment and grabbed the kid by the front of his stupid muscle shirt.

“Hey,” the Chad-looking kid yelped, and his two buddies, who’d been flopped on the couch playing some video game, both got up and started toward him. Jessica moved faster than either of them. In a flash, she was through the door, grabbing the nearer boy and throwing him into a wrestling hold. The third kid froze, and no wonder; Bucky had seen Jessica’s _you want some of this?_ expression enough times to know exactly why the kid was suddenly thinking better of it.

“You three the ones who were hassling a couple of fae girls earlier today?” he demanded, and shook the one in his grasp, very slightly.

“Whoa, _whoa,”_ said the Chad-looking kid, raising his hands. “I dunno what you heard, man, but we were just messing around. It’s not like anybody got hurt or anything.”

“And besides, they were a couple of stuck-up bi— _owwww,”_ said the kid Jessica was immobilizing.

Bucky didn’t even spare him a glance to find out what Jessica had done to him. He kept his attention on the first kid, maintaining eye contact until Chad looked away. “All you did was tease them,” he said quietly. “Is that what you think, asshole? Maybe you’d like to hear what I think you did. See, in the state of New York, following somebody around to intimidate them is first degree harassment. That’s a misdemeanor. You get a little more physical, you put your hands on them, and now there’s a case for second degree, and you can end up in front of a judge. Then there’s the bracelet. I shouldn’t have to tell you that taking somebody else’s shit is grand larceny, which is a felony offense. And that assumes the victims are adults. Those kids, though? They’re both fifteen, and judges don’t look kindly on it when grown men go around harassing underage girls, you get what I’m saying?”

“So what, you’re a cop?” Chad asked, although his swagger had diminished somewhat upon hearing the details of his potential rap sheet.

“Oh, I’m something you want to mess with so much less than a cop, Chad,” Bucky said, and while the kid was still looking puzzled, mouthing _Chad?,_ he let go of his shirt and shoved him a few steps back. “Cops have to follow rules.”

“Yeah, well, so do fucking fae,” said the second kid, the one Jessica was restraining.

Bucky caught Jessica’s eye. “You see any fae here?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said cheerfully. Chad, Bucky was happy to see, was edging away from her, distancing himself from his idiot friend in the process. “In fact, I distinctly remember you and me spending this afternoon at my friend’s bar in Hell’s Kitchen.”

Bucky decided that Jessica had just earned her five hundred then and there, whether or not they ended up getting what they came for. “Look,” he said, in his _let’s all be reasonable_ voice. “All I want is the bracelet. It’s not worth anything to anybody except her. You give it back, and my friend and I walk away.”

“We can’t,” said the third kid. Then he took a step back as Bucky swung around toward him, raising his hands. “We would! But we don’t have it.”

“Shut the fuck up, Jake,” the second kid hissed.

 _Too late, pal,_ Bucky thought; Jake had already made his call, and it was the smart one. “Look, we didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said. “Todd shouldn’t’ve grabbed the girl, but it was just so weird, the way she went all small like that. Her bracelet just came off, and she ran away before we could give it back.”

Bucky was more inclined to believe Emily’s version than Jake’s, but he couldn’t really blame the kid for trying. “Is that one Todd?” he asked, cocking his head toward the kid Jessica was restraining.

“Jesus, Jake, you’re such an asshole,” the kid snapped, pretty much confirming it.

Bucky ignored that. “Where’s the bracelet, Todd?” he asked again.

“Fuck you,” said Todd.

“He threw it in the river,” said Chad, who’d apparently decided to get on the right side of this while there was still time.

Bucky turned the full force of his glare on Chad. “In the _East_ River?”

“Yeah. We were heading over to the park to, you know…”

“Smoke up?” Jessica asked blandly.

“Yeah. So when Todd realized he had the bracelet, he chucked it in the water. Big deal, right? You said it was worthless.”

“Worthless to you,” Bucky said, very quietly. Because that was all this little shit cared about, wasn’t it? Not if it mattered to Kamala. Not if it mattered to a _fucking fae._ “That’s not the same as worthless.”

“I’m just saying, if you were gonna try to shake us down for cash, you shouldn’t have led with that, dude.”

Bucky turned, very slowly, so his whole body was facing Chad. “You terrorized two young girls today,” he said, “you made them feel like it isn’t safe to be out on the street, you took a piece of family history away from one of them, and you think this is about _money?”_

“Jeez, man, I’m sorry, okay?” Chad said, but Bucky barely heard him. These kids honestly believed they could piss off the fae and not face any consequences? He’d show them exactly what kind of mistake they were making. Hell, he’d remind this whole damn city full of humans about why the fae used to give their ancestors nightmares. He’d call the fucking Wild Hunt down on their heads, if that was what it took. He’d—

The cell phone buzzed, again, in the breast pocket of his sealskin coat. _Jeez, Steve, gimme a_ minute _here,_ Bucky thought—and then he blinked, abruptly realizing that he’d grabbed the Chad-looking kid, not by the shirt this time, but by the throat. Because that was what he was: not a representative of all the humans who’d ever oppressed the fae, but a _kid,_ a loser kid who was too stupid to understand the extent of his own idiocy.

 _I don’t like bullies,_ Steve’s voice said in his head, and a wave of shame swept over him. Okay, sure, he was under no illusions that Steve himself wouldn’t have taken a swing at these douchebags, but the difference was that Steve wasn’t any bigger than the girls they’d been menacing. Bucky had three inches and thirty pounds on Chad, plus a left hand that wouldn’t hurt if he broke it on someone’s face, and he had backup. Maybe it should have made a difference that he wanted to pound these kids into the ground on somebody else’s behalf, but when it came right down to it... No. No, it didn’t. Hurting the kids would make him feel better now, but in the long run, it wouldn’t do anything but make him one of the bad guys. And Bucky realized, abruptly, that he’d rather give up another limb than meet Steve’s eyes and see him look back with disappointment.

He let go of Chad’s neck, and then, in one smooth movement, jerked him around and grabbed the wallet out of his back pocket. “Hey!” said Chad, too late, because Bucky was already pawing through the plastic flaps, coming up with a driver’s license.

“Brayden Vanderlan,” he read, and grimaced. “Fuck, Chad, if you’re gonna have a fake ID, you could at least go with a less stupid name.”

“It’s my real name,” Brayden spat. “And it’s better than Chad, anyway.”

“If you’d rather be a Brayden than a Chad, I can’t help you.” Brayden’s student ID matched up with his driver’s license, though, and Bucky committed the address to memory. “Okay, Brayden Vanderlan, age twenty-one, from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sorry your parents hate you. Hey, partner, would you mind—”

“Way ahead of you,” Jessica said, holding up Todd’s wallet and license in her free hand. “Guess where Todd’s from?”

“Jersey?” Bucky hazarded.

“Cleveland.”

“Wow. Not that it’s an excuse, but I can see why these guys have some anger issues.” Bucky surveyed the boys. Todd was still trying to look belligerent, but the other two just looked scared. “So here’s what’s gonna happen. Jake, you seem like you might not be a _complete_ asshole, but your buddies here… Bad mistake letting us get your real names, kids, because now the two of you are in deep shit.”

“I’m not scared of you,” said Todd, but his hand moved to touch something on a necklace chain, under his shirt. Horseshoe nail, Bucky guessed, or some other trinket made of cold iron. The ones who talked toughest were always the most scared. “And all that stuff about hexing people if you know their true name is bullshit. It doesn’t work in real life.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “I’m not talking about putting a curse on you, you dumb fuck. I’m talking about the _internet._ See, I’ve noticed that fine, upstanding young gentlemen like yourselves tend to act one way around your buddies, and another way in front of the people you actually give a shit about. So if I ever hear a whisper about either of you hassling fae kids again, or anybody else, for that matter, I’m not going to bother coming after _you._ I’m going to find your friends and families and tell them exactly what kind of shit you do when you think nobody’s watching. And you know who I’m going to start with? Your mothers.”

Jessica let out a low whistle. “Wow. These guys are fucked.”

Bucky shrugged. “Maybe it’ll teach them to pick on somebody their own size next time,” he said. “Now, before we go, I want one of you assholes to tell me _exactly_ where you were standing when you ditched the bracelet.”

Jake, apparently eager to keep his name well and truly off the crazy fae’s shit list, was the one who told him, in spite of the increasingly hostile glares coming from Todd’s direction. Good. Maybe Jake would be forced to find a better class of friend. “I don’t know what good you think it’ll do you, though,” he said. “You’re never gonna find it. That thing’s at the bottom of the East River, if it hasn’t already washed out to sea.”

Bucky shrugged. “You never know. Maybe I’ll get lucky. Let’s go,” he said to Jessica, and she released Todd, who staggered backward, and turned to follow him out.

The door was swinging shut when Todd muttered, very quietly, “Suck my dick, you fairy whore.”

Bucky turned back, but Jessica was too fast for him. Before he could react, she’d kicked the door open again and grabbed Todd. This time she picked him up off the ground and _threw_ him into the opposite wall, hard enough that when he fell to the floor, groaning, Bucky could pick out a Todd-shaped outline in the drywall, like something out of those old roadrunner-and-coyote cartoons.  

“Changed my mind,” Jessica said, when Bucky turned in her direction and raised an eyebrow. “Keep your money. This one’s on the house.”

 

It was almost dark by the time Bucky made it back to the brownstone. He was wet, bedraggled, and exhausted, and worst of all, he smelled like a foundry draining into a salt marsh by way of a sewage line. The East River was technically safe for even regular humans to swim in, but the condition of it varied plenty according to the exact location and time of year, and the water he’d been in tonight had been on the vile side even before he realized, too late to make alternate plans, that the only way to pick up something on the riverbed was to grab it in his teeth. (Selkies seemed to be fairly resistant to norovirus, thank Mab, but there was a _lot_ of mouthwash in his future.) But for this brief, shining moment, he absolutely didn’t give a fuck about any of that, because he could feel the solid weight of Kamala’s bracelet in the pocket of his sealskin.

The door swung open, and Bucky braced himself for Molly to explode through the doorway, but it was Steve who was running out to meet him. Bucky held out his left arm, which hadn’t been in the water, before Steve could get his arms around him, and said, “Hang on there, pal. You probably don’t want to touch me until at least my second shower.”

Steve looked as if he was about to go in for the hug anyway, until he caught a whiff of Bucky and stepped back. “Yikes,” he said, raising his hands in mock surrender. “I’ll keep my distance. Are you okay? What happened?”

“I—” Bucky began, but by then the door was opening again, and this time it was Emily _and_ Kamala _and_ Molly, the girls shouting and the dog barking as she flung her furry body against his knees. “Here,” he said, taking out the bracelet and holding it out to Kamala. “Just be aware, this was at the bottom of the East River forty minutes ago, so you probably want to wash it before you put it back on. Maybe boil it.”

“You found it?” Kamala cried, and then, “You went in the river for me?” And then _she_ was hugging him, pressing her cheek against his chest with complete disregard for how much he reeked.

He gave it to the count of five before he extracted himself, carefully. “It wasn’t a big deal, kiddo. I’m kind of made for swimming, you know. But you and Emily better get home before our mom _and_ your mom call the police.”

“I’ll throw a leash on Molly and walk them to the subway,” Steve said, grabbing Molly’s collar, which was only possible because she’d stopped running around and started sniffing the hem of Bucky’s jeans with fascination. “You go empty the hot water tank while I’m gone.”

“Thanks.” Bucky blew him a kiss, earning an “eww” from Emily, and went inside to do exactly that.

He’d shampooed his hair twice, and had pretty much finished scrubbing himself down everywhere else as well, when the impact of the whole day finally hit him, and his knees went weak and shaky. He sluiced off the last of the soap, wrapped a towel around his waist, and stepped out into the steamy bathroom, bracing his hands on the sink. His reflection in the mirror looked haggard, the sea-blue eyes empty. He looked, even to his own eyes, very inhuman. And of course, that was when Steve knocked on the door.

“Buck?” he called, and opened the door a crack. Whatever he saw, his eyebrows drew together, and he stepped inside. “Hey,” he said, setting a hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “You wanna talk about it?”

Bucky sighed and raked his hair back. “I almost went off a cliff today, Steve,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know if I can explain it—”

“Try.”

From anyone else it would have been an order. From Steve, it was… well, it was kind of an order, because he was a bossy little punk, but the subtext was, _I’m listening,_ which was why Bucky did. “I went after the guys who were harassing Kamala,” he began, and held up his hand, again, before Steve could jump in with a justification. “No, let me finish. Because I started off with kind of noble intentions, sure, but by the time I caught up with them, it wasn’t about Kamala anymore. It was about all this anger and fear I’d been carrying around my whole life, and how I was making that an excuse to hit somebody back. I… I think I could’ve really hurt those kids if you hadn’t called when you did, Steve. Maybe even killed them.”

Steve was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Did you hurt anybody?”

“No, but—”

“Do you still want to?”

“Fucking… of course not! The point is, I _could_ have.”

“No,” Steve said. “The point is, you didn’t. That’s not who you are, Buck.”

“Yeah, because you know me so much better than I know myself,” Bucky said, his voice shaking.

“Yeah,” Steve said, “I do. You _don’t_ want to hurt anyone. And if you feel this bad about getting that close, that’s how I know you won’t do it again.”

“How can you say that? How can you say that when there’s this whole side of me that you haven’t even…” Bucky let the words trail off. “Steve,” he said, “if I ever… if I ever did cross that line—”

“You won’t,” Steve said. “First, because that’s not you. Second, because I’d stop you.”

“What, you’d throw me over your shoulder and drag me back here?”

“If I have to.”

It wasn’t even the mental picture that finally wrung a laugh out of Bucky; it was the fact that Steve was utterly serious. “I think you’d actually try,” he said.

“You’re damn right I would,” Steve said. Then, as if there was no more to say about that, he asked, “How was the water tonight?” Bucky made an incoherent noise of disgust, and he said, “That bad, huh?”

“I’m pretty sure I found Jimmy Hoffa at one point.”

Steve shook his head. “I can’t believe you found the bracelet at all. It must’ve been like a needle in a haystack.”

“Yeah, that’s why I took a magnet. I got Clint to meet me at the park and put one of his luck whammies on me.” Bucky shrugged at Steve’s look of horror. “Look, sometimes it works.”

“And if it had backfired, you probably would have run into the only shark in the East River.”

“Yeah, but for Kamala? I had to try.” Bucky took a deep breath. “There’s something else, and I want you to hear it from me before you hear it from Nat or someone. I had some help finding the guys, too. I’ve, uh, I’ve mentioned my ex-girlfriend Jessica, right?”

Steve’s spine went rigid. “Oh,” he said carefully.

“Nothing happened.”

“It… wouldn’t really be my business if it had, would it,” Steve said, face carefully blank.

Bucky sighed. “Of course it would be your business. You’re my husband, dumbass. And don’t say I never agreed to it, because I know that, and it isn’t the point. I told you, I don’t want to be the kind of person who cheats. You want to hear something funny, though?”

“Do I?”

“Probably not, but I’m gonna tell you anyway. See, Jessica, she’s kind of known for making really self-destructive choices, right? No judgment from me, she’s got a history and everybody copes with trauma in their own way, but seeing her again tonight, it reminded me how much I used to do that, too.”

“Used to? You mean in the distant past of two hours ago, when you were jumping in the East River?”

“Shut up. The point I’m trying to make, Steve, is that you think I’m with you because I don’t have a choice. Well, tonight I did have a choice. Because Jess asked if I wanted to go get a drink with her, and I knew if I said yes, there was a really good chance I could end up in bed with her again. But I didn’t, because all I could think about the whole time I was with her was how much I’d rather be back here, _not_ having sex with you.”

It was terrible phrasing, and he watched Steve cycle through about six different emotions while he sorted it out, but in the end, he took it in the spirit Bucky intended. “You know, you do this thing sometimes where you’re almost so sweet,” was the answer he finally settled on.

“I know.”

“That wasn’t a compliment.”

“I know that too.”

“I love you.”

“I—” Bucky stopped. “Didn’t know that,” he finished, weakly.

“I’m not offering you any more than that, right now,” Steve said quickly.

“Okay.”

“Because I’m not even sure what it means yet myself.”

“Okay.”

“I just don’t want you to think this means I—”

“Oberon’s balls, Steve, would you stop before you completely ruin the moment?” Bucky said, but he knew he was grinning like an idiot. When this whole thing had first started, all he’d hoped for was that the two of them would be able to get along, maybe even develop a reasonable approximation of a relationship. He’d never expected to get in so deep. He’d never dreamed that he might find love waiting for him in the most unexpected place.

And whatever it had cost him in freedom, whatever it _might_ cost him in the future, he couldn’t bring himself to feel even a little bit sorry.

 

“Fuck the bar exam.”

“Come on, Barnes, it’s not that—”

 _“Fuck the bar exam,”_ Bucky repeated, without raising his head from the lunch table. “And fuck whoever wrote the fucking evil question about torts I had to answer at nine o’clock in the fucking morning. And fuck you for telling me it wasn’t gonna be that bad, Nelson. And fuck _me_ for thinking I wanted to be a lawyer. Fuck.”

Foggy looked across the table at him, not unkindly. “Barnes, everybody thinks they’re failing the bar while they’re taking it. But you aced the oral exams yesterday, and if you quit now, there’s gonna be nobody at the firm to help me catch Walters when she tries to steal my yogurt out of the fridge, so buck up, okay?”

Bucky raised his head just far enough to look balefully at Foggy. Then he raised his prosthetic hand just far enough to allow him to extend the middle finger.

Fortunately for Bucky, Foggy was pretty good at not taking things personally. “Look, you’re three-quarters of the way through this thing. Just get back in there and do what you can. And keep telling yourself it can’t be that hard to be a lawyer if an idiot like Murdock can do it.”

“Funny, Murdock said the same thing about you.” Bucky pushed himself up, neck popping from a morning hunched over the testing computer, and said, “Sorry. Rough couple days.”

“Leading up to the bar exam? Yeah, I can’t imagine why.”

Bucky’s answering smile felt a little forced, but the truth was, he’d asked Foggy to stop by during his lunch break because he’d figured he was going to need somebody to remind him that he could handle this. Not _gracefully,_ maybe, but he could handle it. A year ago, he wouldn’t have bothered asking anyone, but that was another thing Steve was changing: he couldn’t very well chew Steve out for trying to go it alone all the time if he did the same thing, could he? He hadn’t asked Steve, of course, because Steve probably would’ve somehow wound up punching the test proctor, but he was pretty proud of himself for having asked anyone at all.

“Okay, so I hate to say it, but your break’s just about up,” Foggy said, and Bucky gave a theatrical groan and pushed himself to his feet. Foggy stood up too, and patted him on the shoulder. “Get back in there and knock ‘em dead, tiger.”

“You’re making it weird again,” Bucky said, but he gave himself one last stretch, squared his shoulders—and of course, that was when his phone, which he almost hadn’t bothered to reclaim from the storage lockers, chose the worst possible moment to start vibrating wildly in his pocket.

“Don’t answer it,” Foggy said. “Whatever it is, it’ll just distract you. I took a call from my mom on my break, and it was not helpful. You know she wanted me to be a butcher?”

“Please, not the butcher story again.” Bucky checked the screen: WILSON, SAM. Tapping _Accept,_ he said, “Hey, Sam. I only have a second, what’s going on?”

“Barnes,” Sam said, and Bucky had just time to think he sounded uncharacteristically serious when he said, “I have some news. You might want to sit down.”

“Wilson, I don’t have time for this right now. Whatever it is, spit it out and I’ll be really impressed about it later, okay?”

“Steve was in an accident.”

Bucky’s whole body went cold. “How bad?”

Sam knew how to cut to the chase: “If losing an arm is a ten, this is probably a three,” he said. “He’s alive, he’s conscious, and he’s got all his limbs, but he’s pretty out of it. They’re taking him in for an MRI as a precaution.”

“Okay.” Bucky’s voice sounded far away in his own ears. “Okay, well, you need to tell them about the anemia, because if he’s losing any blood at all, it could be dangerous for—”

“Natasha has his medical records. Don’t ask me how. Listen, they might need you to authorize treatment. How soon can you get here?”

“I…” Bucky glanced around him. People were finishing their lunches, starting to shuffle back into the exam room. “I’m taking the bar exam today.”

There were a few beats of silence, and then Sam said, “Oh. _That’s_ why he kept telling me not to call you.”

“Sounds like him. Look, just… whatever he needs, tell them to do it. I mean, that’s obvious. Why would they need me for that?”

“Because you’re the spouse,” Sam said, in a tone that suggested Bucky might want to reconsider his position as king of all idiots.

“Oh. _Oh._ Shit. Yeah, I… Okay, if I leave now, I could… hang on.” Foggy had grabbed his arm. “What?”

“I heard ‘Steve’ and ‘accident,’” Foggy said. “Is he okay?”

“No. I gotta get back to Brooklyn, I—”

“Is there anything you can do for him if you’re there?”

Bucky stared at him. “Are you kidding?”

“Look,” Foggy said, “just consider, if you leave now, you can’t take the bar again until February. The proctors don’t give breaks for personal emergencies. You’ll have to start over on all the prep work, and, honestly…” He leaned forward. “Six months ago, you didn’t even know this guy. Does he even want you there?”

Well, that was a damn lawyerly question, wasn’t it? And it was pretty funny that Foggy was the one to ask it. On the Monday morning after he’d met Steve, when he’d decided to head off the office rumor mill by walking in and announcing that he’d gotten married over the weekend, Bucky had braced himself for a flurry of invasive questions—only, in a startling reversal of everything he’d come to expect from his coworkers, everybody had been suddenly reluctant to ask. Foggy, the only full-blooded human in the place, had been the one who’d broken the silence with, “So is this something we should be celebrating or offering condolences on?” And then, after a short pause, “Because I can do drinks after work either way.” It had been the only thing that made Bucky laugh for the entire terrible workday, but his answer at the time had been, “I’m not sure yet,” and, well, it had been one thing telling Steve he wanted to make it work, another to tell his coworkers he’d gone and fallen in love with the guy when there was still a possibility the whole thing might crash and burn. None of that would make it easy to explain that Steve _did_ apparently want him to stay away, but he had no intention of listening, not because he didn’t care, but because he did.

“It’s Steve,” he said. “I have to be there,” and Foggy looked hard at him for a very long moment, then nodded.

“Find out which hospital,” he said. “I’ll go flag down a cab.”

 

“I’m looking for a patient,” Bucky told the volunteer at the information desk. “Steven Rogers, he was brought in maybe an hour or two ago. R-O-G—”

“Barnes!” Sam called across the lobby. “This way.”

It was a mark of how sincerely upset Bucky was that he didn’t have the faintest desire to snark at Sam. “First tell me how he is, and then tell me everything that happened and who I get to sue the balls off of for this,” he said.

“He’s gonna be all right,” Sam said. “He’s got a concussion and a couple of cracked ribs, but he didn’t break anything that won’t heal. And I’d hold off on the lawsuit for now, since the cab driver who hit him just agreed not to press charges. I think you have a pretty good chance of talking a judge into throwing out the ticket he got, though.”

 _“What?_ He got hit and they’re charging _him?”_

“Well, he did run out into the middle of the street.” When Bucky stared at him, Sam elaborated, “We’d gone out to grab some coffee, and we saw a woman get her purse snatched a little way down the block. Steve took off after the guy—”

“Of course he fuckin’ did.” Bucky suddenly felt intensely weary. “And chased him right out into traffic without bothering to look both ways, because God forbid he should act as smart as the average kindergartener.”

“In fairness to him, he actually managed to grab the woman’s purse right before he got hit.”

“In fairness to—you’re fucking kidding me, Sam. I bet there wasn’t one thing in that purse that was worth as much as our insurance deductible is gonna be for this. Much less, you know, his actual _body.”_

“Well, that’s not really the way he thinks, is it?”

“No,” Bucky said. “It really isn’t.” As they were talking, Sam had been leading him deeper into the hospital, and the muscles in his shoulders were starting to clench as they passed the sterile white exam rooms, the softly beeping monitors, the occasional harried-looking doctor striding past in scrubs. His sealskin, which usually took on a nice light texture for summer, had wrapped itself around him so tightly that he was starting to sweat. “Uh, just so you know, if you’re taking me to a room with a big metal machine,” he began.

“He’s in an exam room,” Sam said, and it was also probably a mark of how serious the whole situation was that he didn’t give Bucky any further shit about it.

He thought he’d braced himself sufficiently for whatever condition he was going to find Steve in; he’d thought wrong. Seeing Steve in a hospital bed with a stiff plastic collar around his neck, a row of butterfly sutures across his temple, and an assortment of developing bruises—including two black eyes, somehow, and a strip of tape across his nose—Bucky had to grab the doorframe and brace himself to keep his knees from giving out. Only a lifetime of practice pretending to his mother’s face that there was nothing wrong allowed him to say lightly, “Hey, I know it’s hard to get a cab in this city at lunchtime, but there are better ways to stop one than using your face.”

Steve looked up, and the instant of unguarded relief in his eyes was enough to tell Bucky he’d made the right call in coming down here. “Buck,” he said. “Is it five now?”

“Five what?” Bucky glanced at Sam, who raised his eyebrows in a _told you he was acting loopy_ look.

“Five _o’clock._ I told Sam not to call you until then.”

“Oh, right, because that’s when the test’s over,” Bucky said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Steve’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do?”

“What did _I_ do? What did _you_ do? Well, apparently you concussed your dumb ass, for a start.”

“How do you know? You’re not a lawyer. Wait, did you?”

“Shut up. He means, _you’re not a doctor, you’re not even a lawyer yet,”_ Bucky told Sam, who was looking perplexed, “and then he means, _unless you passed the bar today,_ which, I told you, punk, don’t worry about it.”

“That’s what I _said_. And don’t do the thing. I’m not your mother.”

“I’m not lying! I don’t… technically have the results yet. And you’re not supposed to run out in front of cars, so I think I win this one.”

“I had him on the ropes,” Steve said, presumably meaning the purse snatcher.

“I know,” Bucky assured him.

“Okay,” Sam said, “it’s true, married people really do speak their own language. You got this, Barnes?”

“Yeah, you can go. I appreciate it, Sam.”

“Thanks, Sam,” Steve agreed. “Oh, and Sam, don’t call Bucky until at least five o’clock, okay? He’s taking the bar today and I don’t want to mess that up.”

Sam met Bucky’s eyes. “You two deserve each other, you know that?” he said, before he swung the door shut behind him.

“So,” Bucky said, sliding into the chair beside the bed. “You banged your head pretty good, huh?”

“Why do people keep saying that? I’m fine,” Steve said, pushing himself up.

Bucky caught him and pushed him back down before he could fall off the bed. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“You’re here to take me home, aren’t you? Jeez, how hard did you hit your head, Buck?”

Bucky couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. He gave himself five seconds to close his eyes and pinch the bridge of his nose, and said, “Promise me you won’t do anything stupid until I get back, and I’ll go find a doctor and see if I can spring you from this joint so we can both go home.”

It wasn’t that easy, of course. It was almost dark by the time Steve was actually released, with a long list of do’s and don’ts for head injuries and a list of warning signs for Bucky to watch for, and then they wound up waiting for a cab again, because Bucky didn’t trust Steve not to try to walk home if he left him long enough to go get his own car, and then, once he’d gotten Steve settled, Molly still had to be fed and walked.

“You know, you’re lucky to be a dog,” he told her, while she trotted along on her leash, grinning her big doggy grin up at him. “You don’t care that you belong to a guy who married some idiot who runs out in front of cars. As long as you get your snacks and your belly rubs, you don’t worry about anyth—hang on.” His phone was ringing _again._ “One of these days I’m gonna chuck this thing in the Bay,” he told her seriously, swiping his thumb across the green button. “Steve, I told you, I’ll be back in like three minutes, just sit tight until I—”

“Hi, sweetheart,” said his mother, and Bucky’s stomach fell straight through the sidewalk.

 

The neurologist at the hospital had told Bucky that Steve would probably be sleepy and irritable for the next few days, and Bucky felt that he deserved a fucking medal for not asking how he’d know the difference on the second part. Given everything that had happened, though, he decided he could use a little downtime himself. He called off work and spent the next two days crashed on the couch next to Steve, letting Netflix stream episode after episode of _Dog Cops_ that he watched with half his brain while the other half rehashed his shouting match with his mother. It was ridiculous that he even cared so much; he was a college-educated, mostly self-supporting, grown-ass adult who’d survived losing an arm, for fuck’s sake—and yet here he was, chewing over what she’d said to him for the hundredth time and wishing he’d had either the stones to tell her to butt out of his life once and for all, or the presence of mind to lie and say he wouldn’t know for sure whether he’d passed or failed until the results came in.

On the third day after Steve’s accident, he wrapped up his arm with waterproof bandaging per Stark’s instructions, took himself to Douglass-DeGraw, and swam laps until he felt like his other arm was going to fall off. It helped, a little; after almost an hour of slicing through the water, filling up his brain with breathing patterns and stroke counts and relearning how to do a flip turn with feet instead of fins, he felt enough like himself again to start making plans. Which was good, because when he got home, Steve was sitting up on the couch, with his laptop open and Bucky’s sealskin draped over his shoulders. “Sorry,” he said, shrugging off the skin and holding it out.

“I don’t mind. Kinda warm for it today, though, isn’t it?”

“It smells like you,” Steve said, and then looked down, cheeks pink. “You have a minute?”

“Yeah. Actually, I was hoping we could talk about some stuff.”

“About your family, right?” Steve gestured at the computer. “Emily messaged me. I’m sorry. For all of it.”

“It was an accident. Shit happens. You weren’t trying to get hurt.”

“But the bar exam—all that work you did. And your mother—”

“It was my choice to leave the exam. Look, I won’t lose my job. Won’t get promoted, but I won’t get fired, either. People retake the bar all the time. And Mom will get over it.”

“Emily said she threatened to throw you out of this place. That she ‘wasn’t paying for you to throw your life away on some idiot human.’”

Well, he couldn’t exactly pretend that was a secret, since half of Greenpoint had probably heard his mother yelling it at him, but Bucky was going to have a talk with Emily about how it hadn’t been necessary to tell Steve that part specifically. “Ehh, Mom will never do it,” he said. “If she did, she’d be giving up one of her ways of controlling me. And more importantly, I wrote the lease. Termination clauses for days.”

“Sneaky.”

“I am the sneakiest.”

“Natasha is the sneakiest.”

“Fair.”

There was a small silence, and then Steve said, “I want to do something for you.” He got up and stood in front of Bucky for a moment, taking a deep breath, and then he then knelt on the couch, with one knee on either side of Bucky’s hips, to kiss him.

“Oh,” Bucky said, mouth muffled by Steve’s. “I was hoping you wanted to sign a legally binding contract that you’re going to start being less of an idiot, but this is nice, too. Do you feel like—yaaugh!” he yelped, because Steve had just slid his hand up Bucky’s thigh. As in, _all_ the way up, firmly and deliberately, and now there were things going on that were going to make both of them very uncomfortable in a minute. “Sweet Iolanthe, _warn_ a guy, Rogers!”

“I’m sorry.” Steve had already backed off, and was halfway across the sofa, with his cheeks burning red. “I—I thought you’d like it.”

“Like—” Bucky sputtered. _“Liking_ it is not the problem, it’s just… jeez. I thought you were the one who didn’t want me to go getting ideas.”

“Well…” Steve was still blushing furiously. “Maybe it’s time for you to get some. Ideas, I mean.”

“Are you telling me you want to talk about sex now?” Bucky said, startled, and when Steve didn’t look up, he added, “C’mon, this is a situation where I need you to use your words. Are you, Steve Rogers, saying that you want to have sex with me, Bucky Barnes?”

“You’re making it sound like a deposition.”

“Look, I’m sorry, but consent is important. Actually,” Bucky amended, “consent is a low bar. What I’d really like is enthusiasm. And I really, _really_ don’t want you to think you have to do this to pay me back for getting me yelled at by my mother, because that’s literally the last thing I want to be thinking about in this situation.”

“Well, if you must know, I’ve been thinking about it for a while,” Steve said. “In fact, a couple of days ago, before the thing with the car—”

“—Before you got _hit by a car_ —”

“—I talked to Peggy about all of this, so you can ask her if you don’t believe me.”

“Oh,” Bucky said. “You’ve talked to the only person you have slept with about the fact that we haven’t. That’s a fun place for me to be in.”

“You know I talk to her about everything. She’s my best friend besides you.” Steve took a deep breath. “Look, I’ve been thinking about it for a while now, whether I could… be interested for you. And Peggy reminded me that people have sex for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily just…”

“Because they’re horny?” Bucky supplied.

Steve made a face at him, but didn’t deny it. “If I was really, you know, repulsed by it, I wouldn’t be suggesting this, but I’m starting to think that for me, sex might be kind of like golfing.”

Bucky cycled through several possible replies before eventually settling on, “Are you _sure_ this isn’t the concussion talking? Because other than a really bad joke about balls and holes, I have no idea where you could be going with this.”

“Okay, look. When I was in junior high, my mom started dating this doctor from the hospital she worked at. She sat me down and gave me a speech about how she wasn’t trying to replace Dad, and mostly I was okay with it—I mean, she was widowed, not dead. But the guy was a golfer, and he kept asking Mom to go along, and pretty soon she was spending every Sunday on the links with him, even though she didn’t like golf at all. She didn’t hate it, didn’t care if other people did it, she’d just never cared about it herself. So I finally asked her, why are you doing this? And she said, ‘I don’t love playing golf, but I love seeing how happy it makes him, and it makes me happy that we’re spending time together.’ I think I never really understood what she was trying to tell me until I was with you.”

“Um. I get what you’re saying in theory, but I’m still having a really hard time getting my head around the idea of sex being like golf.”

“And now you know what every conversation is like for me,” Steve told him wryly. “I have a hard time relating to the way people think about it in general.”

“Okay,” Bucky said slowly. “Well, I’m not exactly averse to trying some experiments, but even if you hadn’t gotten _hit by a car_ recently—”

“Jeez, Buck, it’s been like three days already. Aren’t you ever gonna let that go?”

Bucky laughed in spite of himself. “Even if you hadn’t, we should probably take this kind of slow, work our way up to, you know, the more intense stuff. I’d like us to find some stuff we can both enjoy, Steve. I mean, later on, when you tell Peggy about this, I want you to say, ‘Hey, so it turns out that Bucky Barnes is a kind, generous, and astonishingly skillful lover.’”

“I’m not gonna tell her the details.”

“No, but she’s gonna infer.” Bucky thought about it for a moment. He knew Steve’s deal wasn’t that he didn’t have any biological sex drive at all, or that any parts didn’t work when properly stimulated; it was just a way lower priority for him than it was for most people. A solo event rather than a relay, so to speak. And Bucky was aware that he’d probably never fully understand how something he liked so much could be stressful and weird for Steve, but if Steve was willing to try it, then the least Bucky could do was try to make it easier for him in return.

“So let’s say your guy likes handjobs,” he said, and when Steve visibly relaxed, he knew he’d guessed right. Steve would’ve jumped right in off the deep end, as it were, if Bucky had asked, but it was a relief to him that he didn’t have to. Besides, it wasn’t like Bucky was going to complain about this option. “But even if you both know that’s the end game,” he went on, “you don’t just start by grabbing his dick. You gotta work your way up to it.” He moved over to Steve’s side of the couch and slung one leg behind Steve’s back, easing himself down behind him so he was sitting with his thighs pressed against Steve’s bony hips. He kissed Steve’s cheek first, then wrapped his arms around him and rested his head on Steve’s shoulder. “Wow, okay, you’re really tense. Anything I can do to help?”

“Should I be taking notes?” Steve asked, trying and failing to sound casual.

“That’s not roleplaying, it’s the truth. If you’re not okay—”

“I can handle it.”

“Okay.” Bucky pressed his lips to Steve’s throat, then to the underside of his jaw. He felt Steve’s breathing change when he started working his mouth over the soft spot between his neck and his shoulder, and he paused to say, “Remember, you’re allowed to tell me to stop.”

“I don’t want you to stop.”

“Good.” Bucky let his mouth curve in a smile against Steve’s shoulder. “Keep in mind that if anything doesn’t work for you, we can try something else. Because I’ve had a good long time to think about all the filthy things I’d like to do to you if this day ever did come, so I’m not gonna run out of ideas any time soon.”

“Oh,” Steve said, and then, _“Oh,”_ a little more sharply, when Bucky slid both hands down his chest. He couldn’t quite cover his flinch, and when Bucky lifted the shirt, he saw why: Steve’s rib cage was still mottled with bruises, green and black and purple.

He must have let his face give away a little more than he usually did, because Steve, who’d just been starting to relax, tensed up again, grabbing the hem of his shirt and yanking it down. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”

“Steve, I’m not gonna be turned off because you have a few bruises,” Bucky said. “You’ve seen my arm, for Mab’s sake. I just hate it that you’re in pain, is all. And I wish I could protect you from things like this.”

“That’s not how the world works, Buck. And I don’t need protecting.”

“I know you don’t. That has nothing to do with me loving you enough to want to. Hey, whoa,” he said, because Steve’s expression had completely changed, from wary to… not exactly stricken, but different enough to be alarming. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing.” Steve swiped his hand across his eyes. “So, there were a lot of good reasons that Peggy and I called off our relationship,” he said slowly. “Our lives just went in different directions, and letting her go was the right thing to do. But after that, I thought I’d never find anyone I could feel that way about again. And if I did, what were the chances they’d even be interested in me?”

“Probably the same as the chances that I’d lose my sealskin to some stranger and it would turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“So,” Steve said, “I guess we should take this party upstairs, huh?”

Bucky had never wanted anything so much in his life. “You’re sure about this?” he asked, one more time, standing up and holding out both hands to Steve, the real one and the prosthetic.

Steve took them. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure.”

 

 _“There used to be a greying tower alone on the sea_  
_You became the light on the dark side of me_  
_Love remains—”_

Bucky broke off as the bathroom door swung open. “Molly, so help me, you know if you sneak into the bathroom you’re getting put in the bath,” he began, then stopped, because it wasn’t the dog; it was Steve, twitching open the shower curtain.

“Does that offer extend to everybody?” he asked.

Bucky grinned. “I guess it’s one way to save on the water bill,” he said, holding out a hand to help Steve step inside. “Careful. As much as I’d love to introduce you to shower sex, I think we’ll wait until you’re a little steadier on your feet.”

“I’m _fine.”_ Steve took the bottle of shower gel out of his hands and then, to Bucky’s very pleasant surprise, started soaping him up. “Well, don’t let me interrupt. You’ve got the whole rest of the song to get through.”

 _“Steven, I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the gray,”_ Bucky sang, and Steve’s face went as red as the aforementioned rose.

“Don’t make fun of me,” he said. “And don’t call me Steven.”

“Look, the song needs two syllables there. How ’bout I make it ‘Stevie’?”

“You’re horrible,” said Steve, thereby sealing his fate forever.

Bucky turned around and put his soap-slick hands on Steve’s hips. Until the night before, he’d never seen Steve completely naked. And okay, his body wasn’t exactly the stuff fantasies were made of; Bucky could count his ribs by sight, along with every knob of his spine, and he’d been knocked around enough in his life that he couldn’t remember the individual incidents when he’d gotten the scars on his knuckles and his knees, or even the one up under his hairline that had obviously needed stitches. The ice packs Bucky had made him put on his face had taken down most of the swelling, but the bruises on his chest from where the car had hit him (and hell no, Bucky wasn’t letting that go any time soon) showed up as ugly black and yellow splotches under the bright light of the bathroom fixture. He was a mess. He was everything Bucky wanted in the world. “Listen,” he said, “I know sex isn’t gonna be an all-the-time thing for you, and that’s fine, but we are naked already and—”

“Not now,” Steve said. “We both need to get to work. We can’t keep burning through our time off if we ever want a real honeymoon.”

“What’s this now?”

“I mean, I think we should. Maybe this winter. Someplace warm and exotic, with a lot of water.”

“Sure, and how exactly are we gonna pay for a vacation like that when you’re always broke and I’m drowning in student loans?”

“I guess I’ll just have to move in with you and start splitting the rent. If that’s still on the table, that is.”

“If—” Bucky started to smile. “You’re an unbelievable punk, Rogers, you know that? If I’d known a little heavy petting was all it was gonna take—”

“That wasn’t all it took,” Steve said, already blushing. “I had to be sure it was the right thing. For both of us. Anyway, is that a yes?”

“Yes, absolutely yes. I can borrow a truck from my uncle this weekend.”

“I need a little more time than that. I’ve still got a lot of my mom’s stuff at the apartment that I should really sort through, instead of just moving the same boxes over again.”

“Oh.” Bucky was aware that it was shitty of him to envy Steve for having a mom he still idolized so much when she was dead, but the way he looked when he talked about her, it was hard not to. Sarah Rogers must have been a hell of a woman. Winifred Barnes, on the other hand, still wasn’t speaking to Bucky, which was only slightly more stressful than when she was. “Well, you said you still had some of her paintings, right? We can hang them up in the living room if you want,” he offered, and the look Steve gave him was worth a hundred fights with his mother.

Okay, so it wasn’t shower sex, but it was still enough to make his good mood linger all morning in the office, so much so that several of his coworkers commented on it. Even Murdock said something about how cheerful he was, which led to Foggy making the obligatory _even a blind man can see it_ joke, which led to Murdock tripping him with his cane, which led to basically no work getting done in the office all morning. He’d almost gotten himself back on track when his phone buzzed, and he glanced over and saw Steve’s name on the screen.

“Take it outside,” Murdock told him, before he even reached for it. “Nobody needs to hear you and your husband being cute at each other.”

“How the hell did you know it was Steve?” Bucky demanded, throwing both hands up in aggravation.

“Your heart rate goes up twenty percent when it’s him.” Murdock paused for a moment, then added, neutrally, “It’s disgusting.”

“Excuse me while I take my gross heart out in the hall, then,” Bucky pretended to snarl, but as soon as the door shut, he couldn’t keep himself from smiling. “Hey, sweetheart.”

“Are we doing that?” Steve said. “Because it feels weird to me if we’re doing that.”

“We don’t have to,” Bucky said, trying not to sound too crestfallen.

“I didn’t tell you to stop. Your mother called me.”

Bucky blinked. “What?”

“I don’t understand either. She was very polite, though. She was calling to invite us to Emily’s birthday party.”

“Both of us?”

“She said ‘you and my son,’ for whatever that’s worth.”

“I guess _you and your husband_ would’ve been too much to ask.” Bucky considered. “She’s up to something.”

“That was my thought too.” Steve tended to look for the best in people, but that didn’t mean he was either naive or stupid. “But whatever it is, we can handle it. You can’t miss your sister’s birthday.”

“Not sweet sixteen, no. They make movies about that shit. Not to mention that I’ve put her through enough hell lately already. I wonder if we can afford to get her those New Rock boots she’s had her eye on for like two years.”

“Yeah, I’m sure we can. I mean, how much can one pair of boots really cost?”

“Honey,” Bucky said, “Peggy was right. You really don’t know the first thing about women.”

 

He wound up putting the boots on his credit card, and Steve was still shaking his head about it—“No, I get that they’re well-made and she loves the aesthetic, and I’m not judging her for wanting them, I just don’t understand how they can _charge_ that much for _shoes”_ —when they rolled up outside his mom’s house. “Right, birthdays,” Bucky couldn’t help saying, as they walked up to the door. “We clear on the rules?”

“We’re not bringing her a gift, we’re leaving something in the house that then becomes hers,” Steve recited. “Nobody says ‘thank you’ and nobody is under any obligations.”

“Right. And?”

“I don’t talk to your mother if I can possibly avoid it.”

“And?”

Steve sighed heavily. “It’s probably best if I just don’t talk at all.”

“I love you.”

“Jerk.”

As long as Steve wasn’t questioning the underlying wisdom of the plan, Bucky didn’t see any reason to disagree. He led the way up the stairs and pushed open the door. “There a birthday girl in the house?” he called out, and was rewarded almost immediately by Emily launching herself into him and wrapping him up in a hug.

“Bucky!” she said. She’d been using his real name more lately, instead of any of the usual sibling abuse-endearments; it was a huge step up from ‘Fish Breath’ and honestly, it made Bucky a little sad. “Did you bring Steve?”

“Hey, what am I, chopped liver? Yes, I brought Steve. And we both brought something that doesn’t fit either of us and somebody else might get some use out of if they happened to find it in a bag with pink ribbons on it,” he said, and she squealed and raced off to find Steve and her present, probably not in that order. He watched her go, allowing himself a small, fond smile that was more than a little bittersweet. Sixteen. Holy fuck. He’d known this day was coming, but he guessed it was official now: she was always going to be his little sister, but he couldn’t think of her as a child anymore. If she tried to do half the shit he’d gotten up to when he was sixteen… He shuddered. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Which reminded him. He glanced around the room, getting the lay of the land: probably a dozen high schoolers running around, most of whom he recognized as long-time friends of Em’s; his Aunt Ramona, over in the corner with a wineglass, which meant the younger Barnes cousins were around somewhere, which meant Bucky was, at some point, almost definitely going to get cornered and roped into a long, mind-numbing discussion about the latest goddamn Pokémon game; a handful of neighbors, all fae, who his mother must have invited, because Em certainly wouldn’t have; and—there he was: a kid Bucky hadn’t met before, who was sitting on the sofa with his shoulders rigid and his expression on high alert. Yep, that was definitely the look of a kid who’d been brought along with the express purpose of being introduced to his girlfriend’s mother. “Hey,” he said, turning a friendly smile on the kid as he sat down next to him. “I’m Bucky, Emily’s brother. And you must be the boyfriend, right?”

“Oh, hi,” said the kid. “Yes, yes sir, Mr. Barnes, I’m Peter.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “Okay, you seriously need to relax, kid. First off, Mr. Barnes is my father, and the ‘sir’ thing might actively kill me. Second, I’m not here to scare you. I just wanted to meet you. Emily really likes you a lot, and I trust her judgment. What classes are you taking this semester?”

“Um. AP History, AP Calc, Physics One, AP Bio—”

“Wow, heck of a course load. You must be as smart as Emily says you are.”

“Oh, uh, thank—I mean, that’s nice of you to say,” Peter said, looking relieved.

“Which means I definitely _don’t_ have to tell you,” Bucky said, “that if you touch her in any way she hasn’t explicitly agreed to, or pull any dumb juvenile bullshit like dumping her by text message on the day of the big dance, or generally treat her with anything less than complete and total respect and honesty at all times, I will call down the Wild Hunt on you so fast it’ll make your ancestors roll in their graves, and all the iron in every bridge in Manhattan won’t be enough to stop me from making the rest of your mortal life one long, drawn-out lesson in misery.” He leaned over, patted Peter on the shoulder, said, “You seem like a good kid. I’m glad we had this chat,” and stood up while the kid was still too stunned to respond.

“And that’s how you do a shovel talk, Stark,” he murmured, as he pushed open the door to the kitchen. Sooner or later, if he didn’t find his mother, she was going to find him, and it would be easier to get it over with.

She wasn’t in the kitchen, but Becca was—and so was the prodigal Barnes sister, Rachel. “Rach!” he said, snagging a seat at the table, where they were talking, with coffee cups in hand. “What’d Mom bribe you with to get you to come by?”

“It was guilt, not bribes,” Rachel said. “‘Your baby sister only gets one sixteenth birthday, you know.’ Becca’s the one who did the bribing. Here.” She glanced around, then slid a flask across the table.

“Day drinking, Bec?” Bucky sighed. “Really? And you didn’t tell me? I would’ve been in here fifteen minutes ago.” He glanced around, made sure the coast was clear, and took a swig before passing it back to her. “That’s good shit.”

“Only the best for my dysfunctional family,” Becca said, with what he estimated to be three-drink cheerfulness. “You meet the boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Seems like a good kid. Put the fear in him anyway, you know, just on principle.”

Rachel frowned at him. “You know us girls can take care of ourselves without all that hypermasculine posturing, right?”

“Yeah, of course. But having a big brother means you don’t have to. You guys seen Mom?”

“Upstairs, I think,” Rachel said. “Probably soldering bars on Em’s bedroom window. Thank fuck I don’t have to live here anymore.”

“Hey, watch your fuckin’ language,” Bucky told her, grinning. “I’m gonna say hi to Mom and go get it over with, and then I’m gonna go rescue my husband from whatever predatory relative found him first.”

“You really like him, don’t you?” Becca said.

Bucky turned back. Her face was unreadable, but her voice was a little wistful. “Yeah,” he said. “I really like him a lot.”

Steve was talking to Kamala in a corner of the living room, and looked safe from Aunt Ramona for the moment, so Bucky cut across to the stairs, where his mother met him on her way down. She was carrying a gift bag not unlike the one they’d gotten for the New Rocks, although this one was simply sealed with tape, lacking Steve’s artistic touch with the curly ribbon. “Hello, Bucky,” she said, smiling, and then reached past him, catching Peter, who was just walking past, by the shoulder. “Peter, dear, give this to Emily, would you? It’s not a gift; you don’t need to say anything, just have her open it.”

“Um, yes ma’am,” the kid said, and scooted off as if he might get bitten if he stood there for too long—which, Bucky supposed, was reasonable. She turned to him. “So you’ve met the young man,” she said. “I saw you talking to him earlier. What did you think?”

“Seems like a good kid,” Bucky said, with a shrug. “Polite.”

“Yes, it’s certainly nice when my children choose to be around polite people.”

Bucky knew his cue when he heard it. “It was nice of you to invite Steve today,” he said, stopping just short of _thank you._

“Well, he is part of the family now,” his mother told him. “It was only right for him to be here for Emily’s big day.”

Bucky looked at her, standing there, and a chill ran down his spine. Her smile was bright and brittle. “Mom,” he began, and that was when a shriek split the air.

“Emily!” Bucky cried, but of course it was already too late. It was easy to see what had happened, though. Peter had given her the bag; she’d opened it. And out of it, onto her lap, had slithered a silvery-gray sealskin, splotched with patches of baby-white fur.

 

“You’re insane!” Bucky shouted at his mother, once the door had closed behind the last of the fleeing party guests. Aunt Ramona had made herself useful by clearing out anybody who might have been tempted to linger, before grabbing her own kids and distancing herself from the drama. Not that it had been hard to convince anybody: almost all of the kids who’d been invited were friends with Emily and Peter on social media, and most of them had checked their phones as they dinged with a status notification, blanched, and made a break for the nearest exit. Now Emily was upstairs, sobbing into her bedpillows, and Becca was trying, probably futilely, to comfort her. Rachel had vanished, with a death grip on her own sealskin, and Bucky didn’t blame her a bit. The kid, Peter—fucking hell, that was his _brother-in-law_ Peter, now—was also gone; Bucky had heard him say, bewilderedly, “I can’t be married, I… I have _homework”_ just before Steve yanked him out into the relative safety of the alley behind the house. That was good, because it was probably the one and only situation where Steve was actually the person best equipped to be the voice of reason; it was bad because now there was nobody standing between Bucky and his mother. “What the hell were you _thinking?_ She’s _sixteen years old!”_

“I was thinking that I wasn’t going to send another of my children out into the world to be trapped by the first human who came along,” she spat. “This way, neither of them has to worry about it. He’s a good young man, a smart young man. She clearly likes him well enough. If they make a go of it, fine. If not, they’ll be young enough that they can break it off amicably and find other partners.”

“But they’ll still be _married,”_ Bucky said, unable to believe he was hearing this. “For the rest of their _lives,_ Mom.”

“You seem to have adjusted well enough.”

“Do not make this about me and Steve,” Bucky hissed.

“Oh, of course it’s about you and Steve,” she fired back. “I couldn’t even trust _you_ to take reasonable precautions. You’re going to end up just like me, and I’m going to have to watch you suffer exactly the way your father made me suffer.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, almost breathless with rage, “is nothing like Dad was, Mom. _Nothing.”_

“He’s cheating on you, you know.”

Bucky’s breath went out in a wheeze of something he couldn’t quite call laughter. _“Steve?_ Oh, no, Mom, I don’t think you’ve thought this one through.”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe me.” She marched across the kitchen, jerked open a drawer, and pulled out a manila envelope. “Not until you saw it with your own eyes.”

“What the hell—” Bucky grabbed it and dumped the contents onto the kitchen table, fanning out a sheaf of printed photographs. “Are these surveillance photos? Did you have somebody _following_ Steve?”

“I had a right to know about this human who was part of my family now.”

“And Steve didn’t have a right to privacy?” Bucky held up one of the photos: Steve and Pepper, seated across a lunch table from each other at one of the swanky little bistros she liked so much, both of them laughing. “Mom,” he said. “The woman in this photo is his _cousin.”_

“Is that what he told you?”

“Yes! I’ve met her! She’s a lovely person!” Bucky said, almost despairing. How had he not realized how bad things had gotten until things had come to this pass? Well, he guessed he knew: he’d been busy falling in love. “Mom, look, I know what it’s like to be burned. Believe me, I _know._ But Steve is literally the last person in the world who’d cheat on me. And what happened between you and Dad is not what’s happening between me and Steve, okay?”

“Emily will come to understand that this is for her own good,” his mother went on, as if she hadn’t heard him. “That boy will treat her well, whether or not they stay together. And it’s not as if he doesn’t get anything out of this. He’s an orphan, no family except an aunt who’s getting on in years, so we’ll be his family now.”

“This is getting crazier by the second. You know, stealing human kids from their families went out of style around the time of Shakespeare, Mom.”

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Good, because I fucking don’t!”

“Don’t you use that kind of language with me, young man. I’m your mother.”

This time Bucky did laugh, maybe a little desperately. “Oh, marrying two kids off against their will is totally okay, it’s for their own good even, but Oberon forbid I cuss. You know what, Mom? You’ve lost it. You’ve officially lost it, and I’m done pretending this is okay. Em!” he called up the stairs. “Pack a bag. You’re coming to stay with us while we sort this out.”

“You can’t take her out of my house. She’s a minor.”

“Nope,” Bucky said, “pretty sure she’s married, which makes her an adult, and if she decides to come with me, I’ll be happy to fight it out with you in court until she graduates. I know a lot of lawyers.” He started up the stairs, fighting the urge to look back.

“That boy is going to ruin your life,” his mother shouted after him. “It’s all going to end in tears. You know that, don’t you?”

Bucky’s shoulders stiffened, and he froze for a moment, feeling almost too tired and heartsick to take another step. “Doesn’t it always?” he asked softly, and when he started walking again, she didn’t follow him.

 

In the end Bucky and Becca wound up packing Emily’s stuff while she waited in the car; Steve put a blanket over her, and she was asleep before Bucky pulled away from the curb. “I sent the Parker kid home and told him to have his aunt call you tomorrow to talk about options,” Steve said, after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence. “I hope that was okay. I’m not sure if you can sign a postnup before you’re eighteen…”

“We’ll figure something out.” Bucky glanced across the seat at Steve and added, “I hope you’re not taking any of this personally over there. Because I know how you think, and I want you to know it’s not your fault. My mother’s the one who’s responsible for this mess.”

“Then it isn’t your fault either,” Steve said. “Because I know how _you_ think, and you’re probably feeling responsible for not guessing what she was planning and putting a stop to it, which I’m not sure anybody could have.”

“It kind of is my fault, but for a different reason. I think this has been coming since I lost my arm, really. And not because of that, either. Because of my father. Really, I think Em and I are both paying for a mistake that happened before we were born.”

“What do you mean?” Steve said.

Bucky glanced in the rearview at Emily. She was apparently sound asleep, but he had his suspicions. Then again, if she was old enough to deal with being married off against her will, she was old enough to know the truth. “You know there are two kinds of fae,” he said. “Seelie and Unseelie. Different kinds of magic. Summer and winter, day and night. A lot of humans believe the Seelie are the good guys and the Unseelie are bad, which is a dangerous way to think, because there are plenty of Unseelie who are just sort of mischief-makers who don’t actually mean you any harm, and there are Seelie who’d kill you as soon as look at you, but _in general,_ the Seelie take a more positive view of humans overall. Whereas the Unseelie are the ones who started the Wild Hunt, which is… well, calling it fucked up is putting it mildly. You with me?”

“I haven’t heard it put exactly this way before, but yeah.”

“’Cause you’ve heard the human version,” Bucky said. “As long as you’re in the human world, the stuff you know will keep you safe. The other parts, we don’t exactly advertise. Anyway, the Seelie and the Unseelie used to go to war with each other pretty regularly, but Odin cracked down on that pretty hard at one point—”

“Wait, Odin? As in the Norse god of wisdom, that Odin?”

“Yeah, not important. Anyway, these days it’s more about symbolic victories. One-upping the other Court, getting people to defect, spilling embarrassing secrets, typical Cold War-style bullshit. And sometimes, those of us who are closest to being humans—like selkies—get used as pawns in that bullshit. For the most part, we usually know better than to fall for it—unless there’s something we want really, really badly that we can’t get any other way. Sometimes somebody in the other Court will find out what you’re after and try to bribe you with it, and sometimes people wind up listening. But most of us know that what you get is almost never worth the price you pay in the end.”

“And since this has something to do with your father,” Steve said quietly, “I’m guessing whatever he wanted wasn’t worth the price he paid, either.”

“Oh, he did the only thing worse than paying the price. He didn’t pay it.” Bucky risked another glance at Steve before returning his eyes to the road. “So you remember how I told you there’s no legal loophole under fae law that can break off a selkie marriage? Well, that doesn’t necessarily stop people from trying. Couple times a century, maybe, somebody will get desperate enough to go to the Unseelie Court and offer them something in exchange for breaking up the marriage in a not-so-legal way. Even then, most of them decide not to go through with it when they find out how it works.”

“Which is?”

“If marriage is ‘till death do us part,’ then to break one up, what you gotta do is die.”

“It seems like there’s a pretty obvious flaw in that plan.”

“Well, the thing is, people die and come back on a pretty regular basis these days. Heart stops on the operating table for three minutes, they shock you with the paddles, boom. You’re single. And if you know anything about the really old traditions, like the ones involving harvest rituals and stuff like that, you can probably guess that there are Unseelie who get a lot of magical juice out of a sacrificial death at the right time, under the right circumstances, with a willing victim. The coming-back part is real hit or miss, though, and you just have to trust that the other person will try to bring you back at all, which is why people usually bail. If they’re smart, they do that before they agree to anything they can’t take back. If they’re like my dad, they have to either go through with the terms of the deal, or find some way to wiggle out of it.”

“So what happened with your father?”

“Well. Flash back to about five years ago, when I’ve just finished my senior year of college and have three months to kill before law school. All of a sudden, my dad, who I haven’t spent any real time with since I was a kid, shows up and tells me he regrets bailing on us kids and he wants to be part of our lives again. Starting with me. And he wants to take me on a road trip.” Bucky smiled humorlessly. “He says, let’s go see the Grand Canyon. All the places you could take a selkie, and he picks the furthest point from any water that touches the ocean.”

“So you said no.”

“I would now. But remember, back then I was a dumb kid who didn’t realize my controlling asshole of a boyfriend was cheating on me, either. I thought Dad was being sincere about it. So we packed up the car and started driving. We were somewhere around the Allegheny National Forest when he told me why he really got back in touch. He said he’d met this woman and fallen in love with her—must’ve been the fifth or sixth one after the one he left Mom for, at that point—and he wanted to marry her so bad that he was willing to do anything. He told me about going to the Unseelie. And then he spun me this sob story about how he’d realized he couldn’t risk dying because he had so much to make up to us kids, and he wanted me to help him get out of it. So I was like, okay, I know some good lawyers, this might actually be an interesting legal challenge, human enters a deal with the Unseelie but the fine print’s specific to a fae thing, how can we play this? And then he says no, that’s not what he wants. See, _he’s_ human, but _I’m_ fae. And they’ve been implying that if I throw my allegiance to the Unseelie Court, maybe join the Wild Hunt for a year and a day or something, then maybe they’ll let him off the hook for his own bargain.”

“Bucky, that’s horrible,” Steve said. “I can’t believe he asked you to do that.”

“Oh, you think that’s the bad part? So I did say no to that, obviously. I said no way in hell would I do that, especially not for someone who’d abandoned my family, and I was going to make sure none of my sisters would do it either. I told him I wasn’t spending another minute listening to his bullshit, that he could pull the car over and I’d walk back to Brooklyn if I had to, but there was no way in hell I’d join the Hunt, not for him or anybody. We were still arguing about it when the deer ran out in front of us.”

It had been a massive pure white buck, so big that it looked almost prehistoric, with a rack of antlers like nothing he’d ever seen, and that was how he’d known it wasn’t an ordinary accident. He still wasn’t sure whether the Unseelie had sent it in response to his refusal, or whether they’d just lost patience with George Barnes trying to wiggle out of his bargain and got so eager to punish him that they didn’t care about a little collateral damage. One young, dumb selkie wasn’t worth all that much, in the scheme of things. “When I woke up,” he said, “there were sirens and flashing lights all over the place. A piece of metal from the car door had basically sheared through my arm. I don’t have to tell you what happens when a fae takes damage from iron, and they made things a lot worse by sticking me with needles and loading me up on a metal stretcher before they figured it out, so it was a while before I was lucid again. When I was, I found out Dad had been thrown from the car. He hadn’t gotten his death, though. Hadn’t paid for it. He’s been in a vegetative state ever since. Good news for him is that as long as Mom can’t divorce him, her insurance pays to keep him alive. Bad news is, Mom went from being married to a cheater to being married to a guy who isn’t quite dead enough for the doctors to pull the plug.”

“Bucky,” Steve said, his voice low and anguished. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Bucky said. “I mean, it wasn’t for a long time. It sucked ass, honestly. But I spent a year in recovery and then I went back to law school, and then I met some punk in a bar, got married, and fell in love, even if it was a little weird to do it in that order. I know it was incredibly tough on Mom living through all that, but… okay, I thought if you and me could actually make a go of it, maybe all of us could stop focusing on the bad things and remember that we still have a lot of good in our lives. It never occurred to me that Mom might be so far gone that she’d try to make sure Emily didn’t get all her choices taken away by, you know, taking all her choices away.”

“So what are we gonna do now?”

 _Áine bless you for that “we,” Steve Rogers,_ Bucky thought, and said, “First, we’re gonna make sure Emily never has to go back to that house. We’ll get her legally emancipated if we have to. I expect the Parker kid’s aunt is going to hit the roof, which might actually help with that. I can’t represent her if she brings suit against my mother, because I’d be a primary witness, but I bet I could get Murdock to take this one on pro bono. Then I can draw up a postnup for the kids, and then—”

“Do I have to go back to school?” Emily asked, from the back seat.

“Yes,” Bucky and Steve said, at the same time. “Why wouldn’t you?” Bucky added.

“Everybody knows what happened, by now,” Emily said.

Bucky started to say something about priorities, then stopped, because she was right; as hard as it had been for him to tell his coworkers about his accidental marriage, at least he hadn’t been under the magnifying glass of a high school. He’d seen what happened when kids got hold of gossip: maybe ten percent of them would hear the truth, or care about it if they did, and the rest would believe whatever they wanted to believe about her having tricked a human boy into marriage, and treat her accordingly. She’d be lucky if the worst thing that happened was getting a couple of anti-fae slurs painted on her locker. “We can look into switching you to another school, get you a fresh start,” he said. “If you move in with us, you’ll probably have to do that anyway. This isn’t going to ruin your life, though, I’ll make sure of that. And, Em? Don’t be too hard on Peter, okay? You know none of this is his fault.”

“He’s going to hate me now,” Emily said glumly. “Because I trapped him.”

“I can promise you that’s not true,” Steve said. “He told me he was afraid you’d hate him.”

“But if he ever decides he does hate me, I won’t be able to date anyone else,” Emily said, and when Bucky started to argue, she cut him off with, “Would you date someone you could never marry? Not ever?”

“Em,” Bucky said softly, “we’ll figure it out.” He forced a smile at her in the rearview mirror, and added, “Listen, Snowball, do I ever make promises I don’t intend to keep?”

Emily flopped down across the seat with such quintessential teenage-girl flounce that it might have been funny, if the situation hadn’t been so terrible. “No,” she admitted.

“Okay then. Let’s all get some sleep. I’m not gonna tell you things will look better in the morning, but they will soon. Trust me.”

She didn’t respond to that, and she was out again by the time they reached the brownstone, so deeply asleep that he had to carry her into the house—it was lucky for both of them that she was small for her age, and that now he had a fancy prosthetic that could actually take her weight. He settled her on the pullout couch, just for the night, mentally adding “get a real guest bed” to his list of tasks for tomorrow, and Molly hopped up onto the mattress, glancing at Bucky as if she was asking permission. “As if you wouldn’t do whatever you wanted anyway, you little monster,” he told her, ruffling her fur, and she snuggled up to Emily, who let out a sigh and seemed to relax a little. But she still had a death grip on the sealskin she hadn’t even known she’d lost a few hours earlier, and even in her sleep, she wasn’t showing any signs of letting go.

Bucky tucked his own sealskin a little more closely around his shoulders, but not because he was afraid of having it taken. It was the tail end of summer, and there was a little nip in the air that said autumn was coming. In practical terms, it didn’t change much, but even a fae with as little inborn magic as a selkie could sense the turn of the seasons, the Seelie Court losing just a little of its power and the Unseelie getting stronger. He tried hard to tell himself that was the only reason he was shivering as he turned out the light.

He went up to the bedroom, and Steve was waiting for him. Well, he was pretending to read, but he was doing it badly enough that he might as well have been holding the book upside down. When Bucky got into bed, he said, without preamble, “Is that how you felt when I picked up your sealskin? Like your life was ruined?”

“No,” Bucky said. “I mean, when I was seventeen and the girl I liked stood me up for the prom, yeah, then I was pretty sure my life was completely over. Not when you took my sealskin, though. I don’t really know how I felt, but it wasn’t despair. I mean, worst case, I knew I’d get to spend some time with you while we sorted it out.”

“You know, I already fell for you,” Steve said. “You don’t have to keep using the cheesy pickup lines on me.” Then, more seriously, he added, “Buck, promise me you aren’t planning to go to the Unseelie. I feel terrible for Emily, but I won’t let you risk your own life to put it right.”

“What? No, of course not,” Bucky said, genuinely surprised. “There aren’t too many lines I wouldn’t cross to protect Emily, but I’d have to have a death wish to offer myself to the Unseelie, and if there’s one thing I am, it’s a survivor. There’s just one thing I want to know, though, and I need you to be honest with me.” He took a deep breath, gearing himself up, and said, “Now that you know there could be a way to undo us being married, if you got the chance, would you take it?”

“No.” Steve’s response was measured, firm. “I would have at the beginning, but not now. In fact, now I think I’d do just about anything to stay married to you, as long as it was what you wanted, too.” He smiled a little. “And I’m always honest.”

“Good.” Bucky reached out and took Steve’s hand, looking into his eyes. “Steve, my heart belongs to you,” he said. “Nobody else, only you, forever. Remember that, okay?”

“Um. Sure,” Steve said, puzzled. “But you’d still better not do anything stupid.”

Bucky almost laughed out loud. _“I’d_ better not do anything stupid? Excuse me, but which of us runs out in front of fucking cars? You really are the worst, Rogers,” he said, tucking his right arm around Steve and pulling him close. “But you can’t get rid of me that easily. I’m not going anywhere.”

 

They took him two days later. They took him off the street, grabbed him from behind as he was walking past an alley and shoved him into the back of a box truck before he had any idea what was happening, and the shock of being dumped on the metal floor gave them the seconds they needed to zip-tie his right wrist to a tiedown loop on the bed of the truck and yank his prosthetic off his left shoulder. There was no point to struggling, but he did anyway, until somebody bashed him in the stomach with a crowbar. He was lying on his back, devoting most of his willpower to not puking his guts out, when an altogether too familiar face loomed over him.

“Brock,” he said weakly, and then, “What the hell is this?”

Brock Rumlow smiled. “Look, Bucky,” he said, “I want you to know, this isn’t personal.”

“It feels kinda personal.” Bucky thought furiously for a moment, and said, “If this is about some legal case my firm’s handling, then you’re wasting your time. I’m basically just an intern. I haven’t passed the bar, so they don’t let me in on a lot of the confidential stuff.”

Brock grinned, and Bucky wondered, not for the first time, how he’d ever trusted this guy enough to get in bed with him. The Bucky of five years ago, the one who had two arms and a trusting nature, had been young and naive and, yeah, maybe he did have a history of making questionable decisions when really good sex was involved, but even then, he should have seen how much Brock’s grin made him look like a predator. Granted, seals were also predators in their way, but even wild seals usually had the good sense to steer clear of sharks. “This isn’t about a case,” he said. “This is about the harvest sacrifice.”

Bucky’s whole body went cold. “Whatever my father promised you, I never agreed to it,” he said. “If I go missing, somebody will figure it out. I might just be one selkie, but I’m Seelie, and the Court doesn’t take this kind of thing lightly. They’ll take it all the way up to the High King if they have to, and then you and your bosses will be _really_ fucked.”

“Not if we convince them that you defected,” Rumlow said, clearly unconcerned. “But hey, at least your little sister gets her life back. After all, everybody who knows you knows there’s nothing you wouldn’t do for your family.”

Bucky understood the rest of the plan then, saw the whole scheme laid out from top to bottom, and he started to struggle even harder against the restraint, but he already knew it was no good, even before Rumlow motioned to the other guy, who picked up the crowbar again. When it hit him, he saw stars, and then for a long time he didn’t see anything at all.

 

**Emily Barnes’s relationship status has changed to: Single.**

**James B. Barnes (Bucky)’s relationship status has changed to: It’s complicated.**


	3. Chapter 3

Peggy Carter’s feet touched the ground outside the Barnes brownstone in Vinegar Hill almost exactly twenty-four hours after Steve’s relationship status notification pinged on her phone. She could have made it in twelve, if she’d pushed it, but aside from clearing the trip with Angie (who’d never yet stopped Peggy from doing what she wanted to do, but did like to be asked, and tended to voice her opinions rather loudly when she wasn’t), there’d been a few small items she wanted to collect. They might not make a difference, but Peggy’s personal motto was “Always be prepared.”

Well, actually, Peggy’s personal motto was, “Always carry a stapler,” but that didn’t need to be public knowledge, now, did it?

It was raining, but Steve, instead of going indoors like a normal person, had wedged himself into an awkward position under the eaves that barely covered the last few steps up from the street. His sketchbook was open, pencil idly tracing over a line he’d already drawn. It hurt her heart to see him still taking refuge in out-of-the-way corners, as if he didn’t deserve anything more. Of course, he could probably also keep himself in better health if he only had the sense to stop being dramatic and come in out of the rain. “Hello, Steve,” she said.

Steve’s pencil stopped, and he slowly turned his head. His face looked just how she remembered it, but she hadn’t seen his eyes so hollow since his mother died. She’d loved him so very much, once. She supposed that in a way, she always would. She wanted to step up the last two stairs, drop her umbrella, and hold him the way she had then. But then his eyes dropped down to her belly, and he looked up again, shaken out of his mope just enough to be embarrassed. “Peggy,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“Did you really think I wouldn’t come when I saw that status update? I imagine it is complicated, though. Very.” Her body was currently too unwieldy to sit down beside him, the way she would have when they were both younger, but she maneuvered herself to a reasonably dry spot and leaned against the wall, shaking droplets of rain off her umbrella. “Tell me what you know.”

“Nothing. He’s just…” Steve sighed. “Gone.”

“You’ve gone to the police, of course. They didn’t give you any nonsense about having to wait, did they?”

“There’s no waiting period for reporting someone missing if you suspect foul play,” Steve said, in the same firm tone he’d always used when he parrotted some rule or regulation. She remembered very well how many times he’d managed to squeak by on the letter of the law at school while completely violating the spirit. “I told them that Bucky wouldn’t just disappear on his own. He has a job. He’s only a couple months away from taking the bar again. He just filed papers to become Emily’s legal guardian. That’s not the kind of thing you do if you’re about to pull a vanishing act. But they couldn’t hear anything beyond ‘he’s a selkie.’ The detective I talked to took a report and gave me a case number, but she kept saying that ‘statistically speaking,’ selkies who go missing aren’t trying to be found.”

“That seems rather bigoted.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what I said right before they asked me to leave.” Steve heaved another of those big sighs; Peggy couldn’t tell if his asthma was acting up or if he was just that sad. “What if they’re right?” he said. “What if he made a deal with the Unseelie because it was just too hard to look at me after all the trouble I caused?”

“Steve,” Peggy said firmly, “you don’t really believe that. And even if you did, you must know that none of this was your fault.”

“I told you what happened with his sister,” Steve said, “so you know that’s not true.”

Peggy fixed him with the same look she’d been giving him for what felt like half of both of their lives. “You made it clear that you weren’t forcing him to stay,” she said, “and he made it clear that he didn’t want to leave. He told you that he chose to stay with you, to respect you, and finally to love you. Do you believe in your husband? Do you trust him?”

Steve didn’t look at her for a long moment, but when he did, he met her eyes squarely. “Yes,” he said.

“Then stop blaming yourself and allow Barnes the dignity of his choice. He damn well must have thought you were worth it.”

Steve lowered his eyes again, looking down at his hands. “I’m going after him,” he said. “I don’t know how yet, but I am.”

Peggy made sure her next words were spoken very gently. “You know that if the Unseelie did take him, there’s no guarantee you’ll get him back in the same condition, if at all. You’ve got to at least consider the fact that Bucky may already be dead.”

“I know,” Steve said flatly. “But I have to try.”

“Good,” Peggy said, standing up and putting her hands on her belly. The baby kicked just once, as if to reassure her, then settled again. “Let’s go and find him, then.”

Steve looked at her in shock. “But you said—”

“Oh, Steve, you don’t really think I’d let you go walking into Faerie alone, do you? I want you to understand what you’re getting into, but I certainly know better than to try to convince you not to go at all.”

Steve’s look of relief settled any doubts she might have had about this adventure. She teased him about his lack of caution, but honestly, he was the bravest person she knew, and what made him that way was the fact that he knew how to look his own fear in the face and tell it to get out of his way. But he really didn’t know enough about the fae to do this alone. If he wanted to have a prayer of bringing Barnes home, then he was going to need a partner… and it couldn’t be a complete coincidence that of all the people on God’s green earth, she was one of the most perfectly equipped for the position. She might privately wish it had happened at a time when she wasn’t eight months pregnant, but it was hardly the first time she’d had to make do with less than optimal conditions.

“So, you have any idea about where to start?” he said.

“Several. All of them terribly ill-advised, most of them dangerous, and a few of them catastrophically stupid.” She grinned. “You’re going to love them.”

 

“I don’t understand why we’re wasting our time here,” Steve said. They were in his apartment, but as he’d told Peggy, almost everything in the place was already boxed up in preparation for moving. “None of my mother’s stuff is worth anything to anyone except me.”

“Which is precisely why you need as much of it as you can carry.” Peggy tugged Molly’s leash. The corgi had planted all four feet outside the door and was sniffing at the carpet. “Come,” she said, and then, louder, “Heel, you little beast.”

“Bucky’s the only one she listens to,” Steve said. “All the commands he taught her are in some language that isn’t English. He never got around to teaching me.”

“It isn’t the commands,” said a voice from the doorway. “It’s just that he’s the only person whose opinion she cares about, and that’s only when she thinks she’ll get a snack. You’re not seriously going looking for him, are you?”

Peggy turned. She didn’t know the voice, but she knew the woman on sight, because she was the one always tagging Steve in social media posts. “Natasha Romanoff, I believe,” she said, stepping forward and extending her hand. “Steve’s friend from work.”

“Margaret Carter,” Natasha said, echoing her tone. “Steve’s friend from the old days.”

Their hands gripped for a few seconds while they sized each other up; then Peggy nodded and let go, making sure her step back seemed like a respectful distancing, not a retreat. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said. “Steve, about those things you were going to fetch.”

“Yeah.” Steve took the hint and disappeared into the bedroom. He didn’t shut the door behind him, but she knew he’d give them as much privacy as he could in such a small space. Even so, if she hadn’t known how bad his hearing was, Peggy wouldn’t have leaned forward and said, “Please forgive me for staring. I know it’s very rude, but I’ve never met a rusalka before.”

Natasha blinked, slowly. Then, all at once, the glamor she wore shivered and faded. Her hair, which had been impeccably sleek, melted into a tangle of damp red curls. Her skin took on a faint bluish tint, and the color faded from her eyes; the whole effect was reminiscent of a corpse that had been a long time in the water. When her lips drew back in a smile, her teeth looked very sharp. “What gave me away?” she asked.

“Not much,” Peggy said. “Someone who hadn’t spent as much time as I have watching for the signs would never notice. But it’s pouring rain and you haven’t got an umbrella, and you didn’t have a drop of water on you, not even on your shoes. Which are fantastic, by the way. You must tell me where you got them.”

Natasha hadn’t moved, but there was a tension in her shoulders, an alertness in her newly pale eyes that belied the smile she wore. “I’m impressed,” she said. “Most people guess nixie or kelpie, if they guess at all.”

“Well, the Russian name is a bit of a giveaway, don’t you think? Does Steve know?”

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “Would you have told him?”

“If it were my story to tell,” Peggy said, “then yes, I would. But it isn’t my story, so my opinion doesn’t really matter. How long ago were you drowned, if you don’t mind my asking?” She was taking a chance, and she knew it: on Steve’s presence keeping her safe, on Natasha appreciating directness over sycophancy. Then again, considering this woman had chosen to be Steve’s friend almost over Steve’s own protests, that last part was hardly a gamble.

“Just about a hundred years,” Natasha said, and watched Peggy put the name and the date together, and blink as she understood. “The men who killed me—the men who made me—had no idea how much magic was in that river. If they had, they would have shot me with the others. I started out telling myself I was killing Bolsheviks for revenge, but after a while, I forgot there was any other way to live. Eventually, someone reminded me. Ever since then, I’ve tried to surround myself with the kind of people who’d stop me if I started going that way again. Who’d make me feel like it was worth trying to make amends.”

“Steve is very good at that,” Peggy agreed.

“He and James both. I’ve never seen two people who are so good at taking care of other people and so bad at caring for themselves. I thought if I could bring them together, make them happy, it might feel like a kind of atonement. If I’d ever imagined it would turn out like this—”

Peggy reached out and put a hand on Natasha’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault that it fell out the way it did,” she said. “And Steve doesn’t blame you.”

“I know. But that doesn’t mean I don’t owe him.” Natasha took a deep breath. “You’ll go with him?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then he has a chance.”

“You could come along,” Peggy said.

“Me?” Natasha smiled humorlessly and shook her head. “There’s a long list of people who’d like to ask me some questions about my past, and not all of them are humans. I’d attract the wrong kind of attention just by walking in the door. You might as well take a bridge troll.”

“Do you have one of those handy?” Peggy asked, and Natasha gave a genuine laugh.

“I thought you two would get along,” Steve said, stepping out of the bedroom with a wooden jewelry box in his hands. Peggy started to step between them, but in a blink, Natasha’s glamor was back, and she was looking expressionlessly at him, as composed as ever. “What were you talking about?”

“Shoes,” said Peggy, and Natasha smiled.

“I can’t go with you,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t help. Once you’re in the Summerlands, ask around for Shuri. That’s all I can do.”

“Th—” Steve started to say, and Peggy cut him off quickly.

“We’ll do that. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Natasha,” she said. “And now we’d all better be off. Come along, Molly.”

Steve waited until they’d all left the building, and Natasha had turned in the opposite direction from the two of them, before he spoke up. He might not always be what other people considered tremendously perceptive, but Peggy knew how much of that was simply that his priorities didn’t align with theirs; he went looking for what made people the same, not what made them different. Once something came to his attention, he was a far cry from stupid. “You know, I thank her for the things she does at work all the time,” he said. “I hope I haven’t been offending her.”

Peggy looked at him sidelong. Of course, that was what he’d be worried about. “If you’d known what she was before,” she said, “would it have made any difference?”

“Peg, you know me better than that,” Steve said, sounding hurt. “I just don’t want to hurt anyone because I don’t know the rules, is all.”

“And that,” Peggy said, “is why you have me.” She hoped she was projecting just the right amount of confidence, but privately, she suspected that they both might have to rewrite the rules before they were through.

 

There had been a time in his life when Steve would have followed Peggy Carter into the jaws of hell, if she’d only asked him to. The surprise, which he realized about the time they reached the subway entrance, was that he no longer wanted her to ask. There’d been a hundred good reasons to break off their romance when they did: she’d been right that his heart would always be in New York, and that following her to London would have been an attempt to run away from his problems; he’d been right that she was a more sexual being than he was, and she deserved someone who’d consider it a joy to give her everything she wanted, rather than an obligation. He didn’t grudge her and Angie their happiness. But it had always remained a little background pain in his heart, the emotional equivalent of the tightness in his lungs or the ache in his twisted spine: a pain he’d lived with for so long that he barely noticed it anymore. And looking at Peggy now, he realized that he hadn’t noticed when it went away, either.

Losing Bucky, though… that was something different, and not just because the wound was still so raw. He’d survived too much to believe that one more heartbreak was going to kill him, but Bucky’s absence was like a broken bone that wasn’t properly set. It would be survivable, and one day it might even look like it had healed, but it would never really be right again.

He followed Peggy into the station, bending down to scoop Molly the dog up into his arms and carry her down the escalator. “You know, dogs aren’t really supposed to be on the subway,” he pointed out.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. I suspect Molly knows more than you might guess about how to avoid attention of the wrong sort.”

“I don’t understand why we’re bringing her at all. If this is going to be dangerous, shouldn’t we leave her with someone? I know she gets along with Clint’s dog, he could probably—”

“Molly is as important to this rescue as either of us,” Peggy said. “In fact, I think that if you put her down right about now, you’ll see why.”

Steve hesitated, but when Molly started to wriggle in his arms, he set her down on the platform. The dog lunged forward almost immediately, nose pointed away from the tracks, straining at the leash looped around Steve’s wrist. “Hey, _hey,”_ he was starting to chide her, when Peggy laid her hand on his arm to stop him.

“I’d follow her if I were you, Steve,” she said, and turned to follow Molly, shouldering her bag, clearly ready to walk all day if she had to.

Steve gave a moment’s thought to pointing out that they were following a dog off the subway platform and toward a long, dark access tunnel with a prominent sign that said _MTA Employees Only Beyond This Point,_ and then thought better of it. He loosened up the leash, and Molly shot him what he could’ve sworn was a dirty look before taking off again at a slightly more sedate trot. “You know,” he said, “I’ve been through this station at least a hundred times since I started spending time with Bucky, and I never noticed this tunnel before.”

“Is that a fact,” Peggy said.

“So which is it? Was it never here before, or could I just not see it?”

“Does it have to be either-or?”

“Of course it—” Steve began, and then stopped. “I guess it doesn’t matter,” he said.

Peggy nodded approvingly. “Now you’re starting to see how this works,” she said, just as the three of them came to the end of the tunnel and stepped out into a different world.

At a glance, it looked like Grand Central Station, which was, of course, impossible; there was no way to reach it from Brooklyn without taking at least one train, probably several. On closer inspection, it looked like a copy of Grand Central if it had been built by someone who’d been given an excellent description of the place, but had never actually been there. It was the same giant warren of tunnels leading off in all directions, but the stone walls and arches looked almost as if they’d been carved rather than built. Even the light coming in through the massive windows was different in some way he couldn’t quite define—still sunlight, Steve thought, but maybe not the same sun. He looked up at the massive curved ceiling above them, which was painted with constellations, just like the one he was used to—except that he was reasonably sure these were different ones than he’d ever seen referenced on earth. He couldn’t study them for long, though, because they were rotating even as he watched. It was slow and subtle, but it was enough to remind him that motion sickness wasn’t the thing of his distant past that he liked to pretend it was.

“So where are we?” he asked Peggy, as Molly plunked herself down at his feet and stared at him, clearly waiting for the treat she richly deserved for a job well done.

“Oh, we’re in Grand Central Station,” she said. “It just isn’t quite the same Grand Central that exists in our version of things.”

“Look,” Steve said, “as weird as it feels to say this, I can believe we’re in the place I grew up calling Fairyland. I can believe we hopped across dimensions somehow because we followed a dog down a subway track that was never there until we went looking for it. But I’ve lived in New York my whole life, and you can’t possibly expect me to believe it only took us five minutes to get from Vinegar Hill to Midtown.”

“Well, if that’s what’s bothering you, I can clear it up: it didn’t. We spent more than an hour in the tunnel.”

“What?”

“Subways are liminal spaces,” Peggy explained. “That’s what makes them such a good way to access the fairy roads. Surely you’ve lost time in a subway car before? Missed your stop, even though you’ve taken that route a hundred times, because your mind just started to wander between one platform and the next?”

“Yeah, but… I guess I never thought about it.” Steve instinctively turned to look for the information desk, with the clock over it, and somehow wasn’t surprised to see that the whole booth had been replaced by a huge tree, not tall but enormously thick around. There was still a clock face resting among the upper branches, completely surrounded by leaves and twining vines, but while the second hand was moving forward like a normal clock, he watched just long enough to see the minute hand tick one space backward.

It was fascinating, and he immediately wanted a closer look at it. In fact, the more he looked at this place, the more the weird beauty of its little details kept striking him, making him stop and look again. He wanted to sit down, whip out his sketchbook, and spend the next several hours getting as many of the images as he could down on paper. But he didn’t need Peggy to tell him that if he did that, even for a second, there was no telling when or if he’d get back up again. Hell, if he let a spell get its teeth in him on the very first step of their trip, he probably didn’t deserve to get Bucky back. “Okay,” he said. “Where do we go from here?”

“I suggest we start with the name we were given,” Peggy said. “We need to find Shuri. How we’re going to do that, I don’t have the faintest idea. I don’t even know if Shuri is a person or a place.”

“Oh, Shuri is definitely a person,” said a voice behind them.

Steve turned. There was a young woman leaning against the stone wall at the edge of a tunnel mouth. She was small, slim, and dressed with impeccable youthful style, right down to a pair of clunky, punk-rock-looking boots that Emily Barnes would have coveted instantly. If it hadn’t been for the fact that a pair of black-furred cat’s ears poked out from under the braids piled up on top of her head, he never would have guessed that she wasn’t an ordinary teenaged human. “I like to know when people are talking about me,” she said, standing up and stepping forward. She had an accent Steve couldn’t place; to his ears it sounded distinctly African, but there was something not-quite-human about it, too. “Especially when it’s a couple of humans.”

“How are you doing that?” Steve asked.

“Doing what?” she asked, with a grin. “I’m just standing here.”

“No,” Steve said, “you _look_ like you’re standing there, but you’re not. Is this some kind of illusion spell?”

Peggy glanced at him, for once actually impressed. “I know how I knew it was an illusion,” she said, “but how did you?”

“Molly isn’t trying to jump all over her,” Steve said.

The girl laughed out loud. “Twelve out of ten, heckin’ good doggo,” she said, giving Molly a little wave. “So why are you looking for me?”

Steve glanced at Peggy, who shrugged one shoulder at him. Okay, he got the message; she’d gotten him this far, and now it was his turn. “I’m looking for a selkie,” he said. “When he’s human-shaped, he’s a white male, five-eleven, long brown hair, blue eyes. He’d have a gray sealskin with him. He’s got some history with the Unseelie. It’s possible he tried to make a deal with them and they decided they didn’t want to bargain, but I think they abducted him because they want to hold him accountable for an old debt of his father’s. Either way, I’m here to find him and get him back.”

“A selkie with ties to the Unseelie,” Shuri said thoughtfully. “His name wouldn’t be Barnes, would it?”

“How did you know?” Steve asked, before it occurred to him to wonder if it was safe to answer. He didn’t think Natasha would have steered him wrong, but there was just so much he didn’t _know_ about this world.

“Everyone knows,” Shuri said. “Well, everyone knows what happened to his father, anyway. When Hydra takes revenge on someone, they make sure word gets around.”

“Hydra? Who’s—” Steve began, but he stopped when he caught a glimpse of Peggy beside him. Her face had gone white as a sheet.

“It looks like we need to talk,” Shuri said, reaching both hands out, one to Steve and one to Peggy. “Take my hands, and I’ll bring you through.”

It wasn’t any concern that she wouldn’t help them that made Steve hesitate; he trusted Natasha’s advice to be good. It was the hour that had passed for him in a blink. “How long will it take?” he asked. “Because we just lost more time than I expected on the fairy roads, and every minute Bucky’s in danger is a minute too long.”

Shuri grinned. “You’re with the Court of Cats now,” she said. “We make our own rules.” She reached forward; the hand that grabbed his wrist was solid, and he let her pull him forward and stepped into a different world.

 

It was like the train station, in that at a glance, the room Shuri brought him into could have existed on earth: it felt like someone had taken the offices of a tech startup, a cutting-edge genetics lab, and a really good modern art museum and thrown them in a blender. And like the train station, on a second look, there was no way anyone could mistake this for a human habitation. The lights on the walls and ceiling were bright and evenly spaced, but they didn’t feel artificial; the closest thing Steve could think of was a very clear night somewhere way outside the city, with a bright full moon and thousands of stars. Everything that wasn’t made of a pale carved wood was made of something Steve identified as metal, but a metal with an odd rainbow sheen to it, something he was pretty sure no human mine had ever dug up. And some of the huge, heart-shaped purple flowers that grew profusely in planters and trellised up the walls were literally glowing from the inside, which added a further air of unreality to the place.

After she pulled them out of the train station, Shuri pointed behind Steve and Peggy, to the space Steve would have sworn they’d just passed through to get there, at what appeared to be two perfectly normal chairs, and told them both to have a seat. “Can I get you anything?” she asked, and when Peggy firmly said, “No, we couldn’t possibly put you out,” she shot them both a mischievous grin and said, “You know I had to try.” Once they’d sat down, and Molly had rolled over onto the tops of Shuri’s feet in expectation of a belly rub, Steve found himself telling Shuri an abbreviated version of the story—how they’d met, how he’d found himself opening up to Bucky in spite of the circumstances, Winifred Barnes’ disastrous meddling, Bucky’s disappearance.

“Where is Emily now?” she asked, when Steve came to the end of it.

“When Bucky didn’t come home last night, I sent her to stay with her friend Kamala’s family. I didn’t like how it looked, her staying in the house alone with me,” Steve said, and when Peggy overtly rolled her eyes, he added, “I don’t want anything to jeopardize Bucky getting custody of Emily. I don’t want to think about what her mother would say if she found out somehow.”

“Plus, you were already planning to go looking for him,” Shuri said, looking hard at him, “and you weren’t sure you’d be coming back.”

Steve didn’t deny it. “Can you help us?” he asked.

“If Hydra does have him, I can’t send you directly to him, but I can take you to someone who can,” Shuri said. “But first, I need to know: are you sure you want to ask me for help?”

Steve met her eyes. “Yes,” he said.

“How do you plan to pay for it?”

It would have sounded rude coming from a human, but among the fae, Steve knew it was sometimes very good manners to be direct, and bad ones to expect a favor without offering something in return. He reached into the backpack he’d taken out of Bucky’s closet—Bucky had stopped carrying it once he got comfortable with the new prosthetic—to retrieve his mother’s jewelry box. Peggy had told him a little about the strange and specific way the less human-like fae calculated value, but she’d also told him that nobody else could decide for him which of his possessions might contain that value, and that she wouldn’t be able to speak for him once he started negotiating. It was his mission, she’d said, and therefore his bargain to make. Well, now he was about to see how well he’d done. “This was my mother’s,” he said, drawing out a gold locket. “There’s a shamrock inside from the town in Ireland where she grew up. She used to wear it all the time. Around the time she found out she was really sick, she gave it to me, said I should keep it in case I had a daughter someday.”

Shuri held out her hand for the locket, and when Steve dropped it into her palm, she held it up, twisting and turning it, inspecting it according to some principles only she understood. “Yes,” she said, after a moment. “There’s a lot I can do with this. I accept the bargain. Come with me.”

Steve guessed later that they’d been following Shuri through a maze of winding, twisting tunnels for about thirty seconds before he realized that he’d been so caught up in staring at the stonework—in this part of the structure, it looked almost as if the stones had been made to _grow_ into curving halls and soaring archways, rather than carved—that he’d let himself get completely and hopelessly lost. He really did get, now, how easy it was for people to get stuck in Faerie for a hundred years. Which reminded him: “You doing okay?” he murmured to Peggy, who was walking quietly beside him. “You’ve been really quiet.”

“I’m fine.”

“You must be exhausted,” he said, and when Peggy looked up with a dangerous glint in her eye, he quickly added, “I don’t mean because you’re pregnant; I mean because _I’m_ exhausted. I mean, two days ago, Bucky and I were talking about going to the farmers’ market this weekend, and now you and I are following a cat-person around Faerie, trying to save him from something I don’t even pretend to understand. It’s a lot.”

“We’re cait sidhe, not cat people,” Shuri said, without turning her head.

“Sorry,” Steve called ahead to her. “But really,” he said, more softly, to Peggy, “are you holding up okay?”

He’d always known he could never keep anything from her, but it was funny how he could still read _her_ so well, after all this time. He could still watch her face cycle through the initial flash of annoyance—which he probably deserved—into the part where she reminded herself that he always meant well, even if he was clumsy about expressing it, and then into the part where she seriously considered what he’d meant to say. Then she reached out and squeezed his hand, and said, “Yes, I’m all right. I’ll let you know if I don’t have a handle on it at any point, but I expect you to do the same, Steve.”

Steve smiled back at her in relief. “Always,” he said, and then Shuri stopped at what looked like a dead end, and the stone rolled back to make a doorway.

He would’ve sworn they’d started off in a kind of warren underground and headed downhill from there, but the room Shuri led them into had windows on all four sides, and the floor was crisscrossed with beams of that strange Faerie sunlight. There was a throne in the center of the room with a ring of chairs around it, and on the throne in the center was an enormous black panther.

Steve considered himself a reasonably brave person. Bucky and Peggy had both made it clear that they considered him an _un_ reasonably reckless person. But Steve would have defied any human to look into the eyes of an actual panther without a couple hundred thousand years of instincts kicking in and advising them that they were no longer the apex predator in the room and it was time to leave. Even Molly, who was usually disastrously friendly around strangers, had slunk behind his legs, growling, with her ears laid back flat against her skull. Shuri didn’t seem afraid, though, or even surprised, so with a conscious effort, he rooted himself to the spot and looked right back into the big cat’s brilliant green eyes until Shuri said, “Really, Brother, do you always have to be so dramatic?”

“Well, the two of you certainly ought to get along,” Peggy murmured to him, and he risked a glance at her. She was scared too, but again, anyone who knew her less well than Steve did would have had a hard time telling; her feet were planted in a defensive stance and her hands were over her stomach in a protective gesture, but she was keeping her face expressionless. When the panther stood up and turned into a man—or someone who looked like one, anyway, although he had the same black cat’s ears as Shuri—he felt as if both of them had passed some kind of test.

“I am King T’Challa,” he said, stepping down and coming toward them, one hand outstretched, “and I welcome you to the Court of Cats. If my little sister had seen fit to warn me that we’d be hosting visitors, I might have prepared a more proper welcome.”

“It’s all about propriety with him,” Shuri told Steve, rolling her eyes. “I keep telling him, he’s the king now, he can do whatever he wants.”

“Except for when ‘whatever I want’ includes not having videos of myself posted to YouTube,” T’Challa said pointedly.

Shuri shrugged. “A cat can look at a king,” she said. “And seven thousand cats can look at him if he falls down the stairs in a funny enough way, apparently.”

“Why are the humans here, Shuri?”

“That one is looking for a selkie named Barnes,” Shuri said, pointing to Steve. “It sounds to me like Hydra took him. If they did, I’m going to help them get him back.”

“Shuri,” T’Challa said, “you know we’ve always avoided getting involved in outside problems. The Court of Cats has enough trouble on its own without picking a fight with the Unseelie. Bring outsiders in, and—”

“They’ll bring their problems with them?” Shuri said, with a flash of anger. “That’s the Elders talking, Brother, not you. I’m not talking about helping every human who wanders by, but you said yourself that Hydra is going to be everyone’s problem if they aren’t stopped soon. Helping a human steal someone back from them is one little thing we can do without looking like we’re intervening. And even if it comes out, he made the deal with me, not with the Court, so you can deny involvement without lying.”

“Why is it that you only seem care about the rules when they help you get your own way?” T’Challa’s voice was stern, but underneath that, Steve thought he seemed impressed. Not necessarily surprised, but impressed. “What did you ask him for as payment?”

“Nothing much. Just a few of his mother’s hopes and dreams.” When T’Challa’s brows drew together, she said, “It’s not as if he was using them. They don’t even _fit_ him anymore.”

T’Challa looked like he was weighing the pros and cons of arguing with her, and Steve wasn’t surprised when he decided against it. “Why did you bother coming here to ask permission if you’re just going to do it anyway?” he finally asked.

“I’m not here to ask permission. I’m here because you’re the only one who can open the bridge.”

“You want to send them to the High King?” T’Challa shook his head. “He has his own realm and eight others to worry about, Shuri. He won’t be interested in one selkie’s problems.”

“Bold of you to assume it’s the High King I’m talking about,” Shuri said.

T’Challa blinked. Then he said, “No. Going to that one is too risky.”

“Going to _that one_ is by far the best chance to get them into the Unseelie Court unnoticed.”

“I’ll bring it up with the Council,” T’Challa said, with the air of a man who couldn’t believe he was suggesting even that much of a compromise.

“Your Highness,” Steve spoke up. Peggy hit him with a side-eye that could have frozen steam, but what was he supposed to do? This was Bucky they were talking about. “With all due respect, my husband doesn’t have time to wait for your Council to make a decision. Tha—I mean, I _appreciate_ your sister’s help,” he said, catching himself just in time, “but if you can’t send us to whoever this person is, just point me in the direction of this... Hydra... and I’ll go myself.”

“What, you’re just going to walk up and knock on their front door?” Shuri said, horrified.

Steve squared his shoulders. “If that’s what it takes,” he said.

“This selkie,” T’Challa said. “He means this much to you?”

Steve was opening his mouth to say… well, he wasn’t sure what he was going to say, actually. Maybe he would have said that Bucky had rescued him when he didn’t even know he needed rescuing; maybe he would have tried to explain what an unprecedented gift it had been when Bucky turned out to need him too, all the jagged edges on both of their hearts fitting together. But he never got to find out what he would have told the king of the cait sidhe about his selkie husband, because just then, another voice said, _“You!”_

T’Challa turned around so quickly that he almost did topple over. “Nakia,” he said, with a whole world of feelings in his voice, but the woman who’d walked into the court wasn’t looking at him. She was looking straight on at Steve, and she didn’t look happy to see him. “You’re the one who ruined my mission!” she declared.

Steve blinked, trying to place her. Then he squinted at her, thinking it couldn’t be the same person, it just couldn’t. “You… It was your purse that got stolen,” he said uncertainly.

“And you went after the thief,” Nakia told him, with a fierce scowl, “and got hit by a car. Which called so much attention to the whole thing that someone else grabbed him and held him until the police got there. Do you know how long it took me to set myself up as his target? He was supposed to get away with the bag he took from me, so we could use the tracking chip inside to follow him.”

“And instead, he was caught, and you dropped the charges against him, which meant he owed us. And you used that leverage to get an informant inside Hydra, which, if you think about it,” Shuri said, waving her arm at Steve, “means that _you_ end up owing _him_ for what ended up being an exceptionally _successful_ mission.”

“None of our judges would ever accept that logic,” said T’Challa.

“I don’t know about that,” Peggy spoke up, her voice mild. “I understand Steve knows a very convincing lawyer.”

“I…” Steve began, awkwardly, because he would have done just about anything for Bucky if the only cost had been to him, but even under these circumstances, it was hard to feel that the ends justified the means. “I don’t feel like you owe me anything,” he said. “I would’ve done the same thing for anybody.”

“But you did do it for a cait sidhe,” Shuri said, folding her arms and giving T’Challa a significant look.

“She’s right, you know,” said Nakia, and if T’Challa had been planning to argue any further, that put an end to it.

“All right,” he said. “Follow me, and I’ll take you to the bridge.”

 

“The person you’re going to see is very dangerous,” Shuri warned them, once T’Challa had gone on ahead of them to open the gate that would admit them to the bridge. “We fae can be capricious, but they put us to shame.”

“This person, they’re not fae, but they’re not Hydra?” Steve asked, and when Shuri nodded, he said, “Then who exactly is he?”

She told him. He blinked. “You’re kidding, right? But he—”

“They,” Shuri corrected sharply.

“Oh, okay, I didn’t realize,” Steve said, before he remembered how crazy this whole thing was. “But they’re a myth where I come from, an old myth. You’re not seriously telling me that they’re a real person.”

“Oh, they’re real, all right, and they’re a pain in everyone’s backside. But sometimes they’ll surprise you. Be polite, don’t act scared, and trust them only as much as you have to.” Up ahead, T’Challa was beckoning them; a tall gate, which definitely hadn’t been there a moment before, was swinging open. “Go,” she said, giving him a little shove. “If you get your selkie back, bring him to visit me sometime.”

 _“When_ I do, I will,” Steve said, and glanced at Peggy. “Ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.” She reached out and took his hand, squeezing his fingers, and together the two of them walked through the doorway T’Challa had created. Steve was very careful not to look back, or down, for that matter, as he stepped out onto the bridge—which felt sturdy enough under his feet, although it looked for all the world as if it was made of nothing more solid than light—and started walking toward the gates of Asgard.

 

“There’s only supposed to be one way to get into Asgard,” Peggy told him, as the vast emptiness the bridge ran through narrowed down to something more like a tunnel. Steve was stubbornly choosing to believe, despite everything his eyes were telling him, that they’d always _been_ walking through a tunnel and not some kind of void in the world, or worse, the vast emptiness of space. Shuri had referred to it as a Shadow Road, and after that, he hadn’t been sure he wanted to understand any more about the mechanism. “But a fair number of the Norse myths talk about secret ways in and out, and it doesn’t surprise me that the cait sidhe would know them. Trust a cat to find a way to get exactly where it’s not supposed to be.”

“Same goes for corgis, apparently,” Steve agreed. The tunnel had come to an abrupt end in a wall so black it seemed to eat the light. “I bet Anish Kapoor would love this,” he muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Steve reached out and slid his hand into the patch of darkness, expecting to feel cold, or a shock, or… something. There was no more sense of resistance than there’d been when Shuri pulled them out of the train station, but he wasn’t expecting it when Molly decided she’d had enough of waiting and bolted forward. For such a small animal, she had a heck of a towing capacity; one good tug and she was through, pulling Steve with her, through the darkness and out the other side.

He blinked, letting his eyes adjust to the light. He and Molly were in a large, airy room that gave the impression, at first, of being completely gaudy; it was full of expensive-looking carved chairs and end tables littered with gold statues, wall hangings that tended toward black and dark green. But that was a first impression. Every time his eyes landed on a particular piece for more than a second, it would stand out as something finely crafted, something beautiful in its own right that only looked tacky because it was surrounded by clutter.

That was an interesting insight to have into the person who occupied one of the room’s more ostentatious, but also less uncomfortable-looking, chairs. To Steve, they looked like a young man with long dark hair, handsome in the abstract, but too cold to be his type, especially around the eyes. They looked bored, sprawled across the cushions with their legs draped over one arm and their back against the other; they were idly tossing some little gold trinket from hand to hand, and barely glanced up as Steve came into the room. “Oh,” they said. “Another one? That princess has a softer heart than she lets on.”

“Hi,” Steve said. He held out his hand to Peggy as she stepped out of nowhere beside him, steadying her, and gave her a minute to get her feet before he turned back to Loki of Asgard. “Your highness,” he said, aiming for a tone somewhere between _polite_ and _unimpressed._

Loki raised an eyebrow. Steve had a sudden strong impression that they’d practiced that look in a mirror. “Is that how you address a god, human?”

“My name is Steve,” said Steve, carefully not saying what he was thinking: that he might not be a practicing religious person anymore, but if there was a God, there was only one, and He definitely didn’t dress like that. “This is Peggy. We’ve come to ask for your help.”

“Oh?” Loki did the eyebrow thing again. “Well, I sincerely hope you’re not here to offer me your firstborn child in exchange. I really can’t think of anything that interests me less.”

Steve planted his feet and set his jaw. He imagined he looked like he was bracing himself to take a punch, which wasn’t far from how he felt, having to go through the whole story again. “The baby isn’t for sale,” he said. “I’m here because there’s a selkie—”

“Who you’re married to, yes. The magic is all over you. Well, I’m sorry to tell you that breaking off a selkie marriage is outside my area of expertise. My father could do it, maybe. But unless you’re willing to go to the Unseelie and undertake the harvest ritual, there’s nothing I can do, and the three of you will just have to come to some sort of arrangement.”

Steve shook his head. “You’re misreading the situation,” he said. “Peggy and I aren’t—I’m not here because I’m trying to break it off with my selkie. I love him. I’m here because we think Hydra took him, and I’m trying to get him back.”

“Ah,” said Loki. “Well. That _is_ slightly more interesting.” They turned to Peggy. “And how does the woman fit into all this?”

“The woman can bloody well speak for herself,” Peggy said. “And Steve and I may not be _in_ love at the moment, but that doesn’t mean we can’t love each other very much. I’m not about to let him walk into danger alone.”

“Really,” said Loki. “And is that your only motive, or is this just the first time you’ve had an excuse to run off to Faerie since your brother disappeared?”

Peggy’s cheeks flamed red, briefly, and Steve… well, Steve couldn’t be sure how much of that was embarrassment and how much was anger, but he wouldn’t have wanted to be Loki just then. “Neither my baby nor my brother is up for discussion at the moment, thank you,” she said. “Let’s get back to how you’re going to help Steve find his selkie.”

“Yes, of course. You have a picture of him, I assume?”

Steve started to reach for his phone, then stopped, and closed his fingers around the leather cover of his sketchbook instead. He couldn’t have explained why; he was just acting on his instincts, and this felt right. He flipped to what he considered one of his better pieces: Bucky standing in the bedroom they shared, shirtless, paused in the act of pulling his soft gray sealskin over his bare shoulders. He handed it to Loki, who took it and looked at it without changing expression.

“Yes,” they said. “That one does look familiar.”

“That’s not much to stake our lives on,” Peggy said. Her tone was just slightly unsteady; Loki had landed an unexpected blow with that comment about her brother, and it was still stinging. Steve knew exactly how she felt.

“No, it isn’t. But perhaps this would be,” Loki said, standing up from the chair.

Steve had taken three steps forward before he even realized what he was doing, because what he’d taken for a blanket lying across the chair was actually Bucky’s sealskin. Peggy caught his arm about the same time Loki snatched the skin and took a step back, holding it out of reach. “Uh-uh-uh,” they said, with a warning expression that made them look for all the world like Bucky reprimanding Molly for trying to steal food. “This was payment to me for services rendered.”

“It doesn’t belong to you,” Steve said, through clenched teeth. “What good would it even do you, anyway?”

“You may not know this, but I’m one of the few people who could use this skin for its intended purpose,” Loki said. “I’ve spent some time as a seal before, actually. I have to say, I found it much more pleasant than being a horse.”

“I don’t care who gave it to you, or why,” Steve said, fists clenched. “It’s not yours. It doesn’t matter what the rules say. It’s not _right.”_

Loki shot a sympathetic glance at Peggy. “My sympathies for your friend,” they said. “He can’t possibly be that naive, which means, I suppose, that he must really be that stupid. Anyhow, the good news for you both is that I’m not averse to giving this back, or to helping you, for that matter, but,” they took another step back as Steve started to reach for the skin again, “before we go any further, we really should discuss the distasteful matter of payment.”

With a tremendous effort, Steve made himself take a step back. It wasn’t right, but Loki had all the power here, and if he had to buy back Bucky’s sealskin as well as Bucky’s life, well, this was a price he was willing to pay. Fighting down his anger, he dug into his bag again for the jewelry box, and this time, his hand closed around the most precious thing his mother had ever owned: her wedding ring. If he closed his eyes, he could almost hear the soft Irish burr of her voice when she’d told him to keep it, instead of burying it with her. _There’s no sense putting something as lovely as a diamond back in the earth,_ she’d said, and he’d wanted to tell her that if that was true, she shouldn’t be buried either.

“This was my mother’s,” he began, holding it out, but Loki was already shaking their head.

“Trinkets,” they said, disgusted. “Small magics. _Sentiment._ Those might get you somewhere with the fae, but do I look as if I want for either magic or gold?”

Steve took a deep breath. “Then what do you have in mind?” he asked.

“Steve,” Peggy said, her voice low, and he shook his head. He knew it was dangerous to offer Loki whatever he wanted, and probably stupid. He also knew he was going to do it, and they didn’t have time for a debate. And Loki looked as if they’d followed the whole train of logic, and were amused by it.

“There’s obviously something they want or they wouldn’t still be talking to us,” he said. “We might as well cut to the chase.”

“Well, thank you for getting my pronoun right, anyway. You’d be amazed how difficult that seems to be for some people, even after five thousand years.” Loki looked at them both for a long moment, considering. Steve’s sketchbook was still in their hand. They stepped forward—keeping the sealskin out of reach—and handed the book back to him. “I want a portrait,” they said.

Steve choked. “You’re saying you’ll give me that sealskin and help me get my husband back... for an _art commission?”_

“Oh, I never said I’d help you get your husband _back,”_ Loki corrected. “I can send you to where he _is._ Beyond that, it’s entirely up to you. I’m picturing something large, and in full color, obviously. Do you ever work in oils?”

“No tricks?” It was pointless to say that to a legendary trickster, but Steve couldn’t help himself.

Loki held up a hand in what Steve assumed was the Asgardian equivalent of a _scout’s honor_ sign. “You have my word.”

“Okay. Send me some reference photos, I guess. Or come by my place and I’ll take some, assuming I’m not dead or stuck here for a hundred years at that point.” And Steve hadn’t thought it was possible for today to get any more surreal. “Now, could we talk about exactly who, or what, has my husband and how I bring him home?”

Loki tipped their head and looked harder at him. “You’re planning a rescue, and you really don’t know anything about Hydra?”

“As you’ve helpfully pointed out, I know quite a bit about it,” Peggy said sharply. “I was planning to fill Steve in along the way, only we’ve been rather busy since we started.”

“Be my guest, then,” Loki said, flopping back across the chair.

Steve knew Peggy too well to think she’d be cowed by something as minor as a sarcastic demigod, and he was right. “The Wild Hunt is a fae… I’m not sure I’d say tradition,” she began. “A phenomenon, let’s say, that’s been around more or less forever. It’s a group of hunters who ride out into the world for a night and then vanish again at daybreak. Most of them are Unseelie; a few might be human; some are even rumored to be dead. The Hunt takes different forms over the years, largely depending on who summons it and why. Sometimes they mainly seem interested in making mischief like children on Halloween—which is how you factor in, I assume,” she said, with a glance at Loki, who only shrugged. “Other times they’re sent out as a herald of war, or for a revenge killing, or even, in the old days, to kidnap human children to be used as harvest sacrifices.”

“Bucky told me the Courts put a stop to that kind of thing centuries ago,” Steve said. “So why does the Hunt still exist?”

“Because it’s far too simplistic to think of the Hunt as good or bad in itself,” Loki spoke up, almost absently, as if they were explaining some obvious fact to a child. “The Hunt serves a purpose. A wolf belongs in the ecosystem just as much as a rabbit.”

“How come the wolf came after Bucky, then?” Steve asked.

“At risk of belaboring the metaphor, it’s because Hydra now holds the leash of this particular wolf.”

“Hydra,” Peggy elaborated, “is a sort of fringe group that’s currently very powerful among the fae. Normally, the Seelie and Unseelie Courts normally keep each other in check. A fair number of the Unseelie would like to see that balanced tipped in their favor, and Hydra takes advantage of that to increase its following, but they’re not on anyone’s side, not really. They care very much about having all the power they can, and not very much about how they get it.”

“Which I do sympathize with, to a certain extent,” Loki said idly. “But tipping the balance too far could get… messy, and I also enjoy the continuing existence of the universe.”

“So you’re not just in this for an art commission,” Steve observed.

“Does that change things for you?”

Steve clenched his jaw and shook his head. “I don’t like the idea of being a pawn in whatever game you’re playing,” he said, “but I like the idea of losing Bucky a lot less, and you haven’t asked me to do anything I wouldn’t do anyway—yet. So what do I have to do to get him back?”

“Convince him to go back with you, I imagine. That part’s fairly standard. After that…” Loki waved a hand, and said, “I imagine it won’t be too hard to bring about a typical fairy-tale ending.”

“Convince him?” Steve said, skeptical. “That’s all? He’s a prisoner, of course he wants to go home.”

“You’ll also need to find him, first, and separate him from the others.”

“Which is easier said than done,” Peggy said. “Once the Wild Hunt rides, they stop for nothing and no one. That’s the catch, isn’t it? We’ll have to _make_ him stop long enough to listen.”

“You do know your folklore very well, for a human,” Loki agreed. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather invest in a love spell for this one, Steve Rogers? It would be much easier than what you’re setting out to do.”

Loki couldn’t have been any more obviously trying to push his buttons, but that still shouldn’t have stung as much as it did. Steve took a long, slow breath. “Is there anything else we need to know before we get on with it?”

“Not especially.” Loki waved their hand in a slow circle, and Steve felt a vaguely electric crackle go through the air, a shift in pressure, as another portal opened in front of them. Steve gave Molly’s leash a gentle tug and started to walk toward it, pausing in front of Loki’s chair. “I think you forgot something.”

“Oh, yes.” Loki handed him the sealskin; Steve looped it over his arm while Loki reached a hand down to pat the dog as she passed, and she growled low in her barrel chest and snapped her teeth at them.

“Oh, I like her,” Loki said, as they drew their fingers back. “Good luck, Steve Rogers and company. Try not to die. It’s always disappointing when that happens.”

“I didn’t know you cared,” Steve said, through clenched teeth, and Loki was still laughing behind him as he walked through yet another portal, into yet another world.

 

It was bitingly cold. He honestly didn’t know why he’d been expecting anything different, when he’d known full well that he was going into Unseelie territory, but the wind went right through his jacket the moment he stepped through the circle. He’d walked, apparently, through the gap in a ring of standing stones, into a snow-covered forest. Surprise froze him—only metaphorically, thank God—to the spot just long enough for Peggy, stepping through behind him, to bump her belly into him and knock them both into a snowbank. He heard her say, “Bugger,” and after he’d picked himself up, he turned to offer her a hand up as well. “Sorry,” he shouted, over the howling of the wind whipping around the stones.

“Not your fault,” she called back, “but we’d better get out of this wind and get our bearings,” and struck out as if she knew exactly where she was going, moving downhill from the circle. It was lucky he was kind of a wimp who broke out his good wool coat at the beginning of autumn; otherwise their whole rescue could have ended abruptly right here. “Hey,” he said to Peggy, who was stomping snow off her sturdy walking shoes, and held out the sealskin. “Here. You and the baby need to stay warm.” When she stared at him, he said, “Don’t worry, it’s safe. You’re already married. And I’d rather one of us put it on for safekeeping until we’re with Bucky again.”

“It’s a very nice thought, Steve, but it’s not exactly maternity style.”

“Put it on. You might be surprised,” he urged, and she set down her bag and slipped it over her shoulders, probably just to show him—then looked pleasantly surprised when it wrapped over her belly with room to spare. “I think it likes you,” he said, allowing himself a smile.

“Oh, really, Steve.” But she didn’t take it off.

“How did you know this cave would be here?” he asked.

“Oh, that? It’s fairy tale logic. We’re in Faerie now—Annwn, to be specific. The land itself is a little bit sentient here. It has a way of taking you where you need to go.”

“I don’t—” Steve cut himself off. Saying he didn’t understand seemed woefully inadequate to the situation. “Are you saying we’re safe here?”

“For a few minutes, anyway. Let’s not waste them. We need to talk about how we’re going to find Barnes and what happens when we do.”

“Peggy,” Steve began, “we can talk about the other thing if you want to.”

“There’s no other thing.”

“But your br—”

 _“There’s no other thing,”_ Peggy repeated, and Steve was trying to decide whether or not to push the issue when Molly suddenly set up a cavalcade of barking outside the mouth of the cave. “Oh, no,” Peggy said softly, before she raced outside. Steve followed her, and then, even with his faulty hearing, he heard it too: the sound of hunting horns.

“That’s the—” he began, and she nodded. “What do we do?”

“Get to a high place. We need to be out of their path, and we should confirm that Bucky is with them before we let them know we’re coming.”

“Okay.” Steve glanced wildly around, getting his bearings. At the bottom of the hill they’d come partway down, there was a road, and a stone bridge running over it, from this hill to another. “There,” he said, pointing, before he grabbed Molly and made a run for it.

There was barely time to cover the distance, not at the speed either of them was capable of moving at, and Steve dove for the bridge just as the first of the horses came around a curve in the road. Peggy dropped to the ground beside him, and Molly hunkered down at his other side, ears flattened and teeth bared, as the riders came into view.

The horses—or the horse-like things, anyway—were bad enough: monstrous black beasts the size of Clydesdales, eyes glowing and hooves thundering, every line of their bodies screaming speed and power. The riders were worse. All of them were vaguely human in shape, but each one sported its own particular inhuman features: curled horns or fur or feathers, long claws or sharp fangs. The one in front wore what Steve sincerely hoped was a mask made from an elk skull, with huge curved antlers swooping upward and red eyes burning behind white bone sockets. The whole Hunt looked vitally, terribly _wrong_ to his human eyes, but he wasn’t sure it would have looked any better to fae ones. He didn’t want to look, and at the same time he didn’t want to look away—and that was how he almost missed the last figure in the long line of riders, the one with long brown hair and a dark mask covering all of his face but his sea-blue eyes. There was something at his side that Steve initially took for armor, but on a closer look, it was a gleaming construct of silver metal where his left arm should have been.

Metal. A solid chunk of metal next to Bucky, _attached_ to Bucky. Bucky, who could feel the amount of metal in a cell phone, who got nauseous if he walked across a bridge made of steel girders, whose worst nightmares involved getting stuck in cars or subways. The pain must have been indescribable.

Steve was up and over the railing of the bridge before he even knew he was planning it. “Wait,” Peggy cried, shaking herself out of it and reaching for him, too late; it was an eight-foot drop to the road under the bridge. Steve hit the ground hard and let out a yell, and Bucky pulled back on the reins as the horse reared, more out of surprise, Steve was sure, than any desire not to trample anything in its path.

Steve pushed himself up to his knees, unable to look away. The parts of Bucky he could see looked subtly different than the last time Steve had seen him: his hair was a little longer, maybe, and his body was thicker, heavier, lean swimmer’s muscles traded for a prizefighter’s. The real difference, though, was in his eyes, which were blank, empty, and utterly cold.

“Bucky,” he said, putting all the love, all the pleading, all the hope in his heart behind the word.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” said Bucky—and then the horse reared again, and he leaned close to its neck as it dashed away, hooves striking sparks off the cobblestones as it went.

 

“I should have seen it coming,” Steve said, wincing, while Peggy dabbed at his knee with an alcohol wipe. By some miracle, he hadn’t hurt himself too badly; both hands and both knees were a mess of scrapes and bruises, some of them embedded with gravel, and she’d packed a plastic bag full of snow for him to hold against his wrist, which was swollen from where he’d thrown it out to break his fall. “He told me flat out, Peggy. He said that without his sealskin, he wouldn’t even know who he was anymore.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Peggy said, fishing a roll of gauze out of the tin. He’d seemed surprised when she brought the large first aid kit out of her bag, as if she hadn’t known who she was dealing with. “If you want to be angry with someone, Steve, be angry with Hydra. Be angry with the people who took his sealskin, knowing full well what they were doing. Be angry that they don’t care who they hurt in the name of power. Be angry with me if you need to, for that matter. You wouldn’t be entirely wrong if you did,” she added, forcing herself not to flinch away from his sharp gaze. “I should have known better than to let Loki distract me at all, much less to such an extent that I didn’t manage to stop you going over that railing.”

“That wouldn’t have changed anything,” Steve said miserably. Then he paused, cradling his wrist, and she knew what was coming before he said, “You know that if you want to go looking for your brother again—”

Peggy shook her head. “After Michael disappeared, it defined who I was for a very long time,” she told him. “I was the only one who believed the fae had taken him. It’s why I studied the things I did, why I took the job I did—it’s even responsible for why I was at the party where I met my wife. But it’s been over twenty years without a trace, and if Michael turned up on my doorstep tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t recognize him anyhow. So, no, I’m not interested in making a deal with the god of mischief to get him back. Years ago I would have been, but not now. You, on the other hand, still have a chance of saving Bucky, so let’s focus on that, shall we?”

She could literally see him push the pain down and clench his jaw as he nodded, and she’d never wished more sincerely that she could tell someone it was all going to be all right, but where Hydra was involved, there was no guarantee of that. “So what do we do?” he asked.

“We know the Hunt passes this way, and they ride out every night at sunset, which means we know where they’ll be and when. We need to—” Peggy paused, because Molly had just raised her head and was staring at the cave entrance, ears up, on high alert.

Peggy put her finger over her lips to signal for silence, then reached out and doused the light on the electric camping lantern that illuminated the cave. Praying that Molly would stay put and not get more underfoot than usual, she got to her feet as quietly as she could. It wasn’t her best work, as the baby made every movement awkward, but she wasn’t an amateur, either. The cave was pitch black, but if she shut her eyes and listened hard, she could pick out Steve’s breathing, and over _there,_ and the soft breaths of the other human were coming from _there,_ which meant that if she timed it just right…

Peggy lunged and grabbed the intruder, and Steve clicked the lantern back on just as the body of the other human—or humanoid, perhaps—hit the ground under the force of her flawless judo throw. He had no obviously fae features, but then, civilians were always surprised by how few fae did. He did have a shock of unruly blonde hair, several bandages of various sorts on his face—what was _wrong_ with men, literally throwing themselves at every threat face-first?—and hearing aids in both ears, which, since he’d opted for medical devices over a spell to boost his hearing, strongly implied that he was more human than fae. There was a compound hunting bow in one of his hands, both of which he’d already raised over his head in surrender. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, “can’t we talk about this?”

 _“Clint?”_ Steve said. “What the hell are you doing here? Peggy, this is—”

“Clint Barton, yes.” Peggy frowned as she placed the name, matching it with those other photos she’d seen Steve tagged in on Facebook. “If this is one of your friends from Brooklyn, Steve, then why is he carrying S.H.I.E.L.D. gear?”

“Haha, well, funny story,” said Clint. “Coincidentally, Steve, who’s the terrifying woman with her boot on my chest?”

“Clint, this is my friend Peggy Carter,” said Steve, who seemed to have passed completely through surprise and come out the other side. “Peggy, would you give Clint his autonomy back, please? And what do you mean, S.H.I.E.L.D. gear? Isn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. the—”

“Supernatural-Human Investigation, Enforcement, and Liaison Division, yeah,” Clint said. “But I’m pretty sure somebody just really wanted the acronym to spell ‘shield.’ How does your scary fr—oh my God,” he said, “you’re Margaret Carter. As in _Agent_ Carter, from—”

“MI-13, yes,” Peggy said. “And before you ask, yes, I’m _that_ Agent Carter from the Summerlands murder case, and from the incident in the Budapest goblin market.”

“You were in Budapest? Hey, so was I. Ranged support,” he said, gesturing with the bow. “That was a bad business for the folks on the ground. I heard you were the person who kept it from being a whole lot worse. You know, if you ever wanted to come over to S.H.I.E.L.D., I hear the consulting fees are—”

“Stop trying to recruit my friend, and start explaining how the most accident-prone person I’ve ever met is allowed to work for S.H.I.E.L.D. and carry an archery bow and a bunch of pointy sticks,” Steve said, sounding more resigned than anything.

“Yeah, so, funny story about that.” Clint sat up, now that Peggy had removed her foot from his solar plexus. “See, my deal—I _think,_ ‘cause I’m adopted, which means I had a heck of a time even figuring out this much—is that I’m part gremlin. I can kind of… store up good luck for when I need it. When I’m just doing ordinary stuff, I basically run a low-level bad-luck field around me all the time, so I can save up the good stuff for what really matters. But when I turn the good luck on, the perp I’m chasing trips on a curb and sprains his ankle, or I walk into Starbucks and the suspect we’ve all been hunting for months is in there getting her caramel macchiato on. And if I turn it on while I’ve got a weapon in my hand, well,” he said, shrugging and gesturing with the bow, “can’t seem to miss.”

Steve shook his head. “Okay, that explains why they let you have pointy things,” he said, “but it doesn’t explain why you followed us into Faerie.”

“Um, Nat asked me to, duh? She’s been worrying about you two for days.”

“Days?” Steve said, alarmed. “It’s barely been eight hours for us.”

“Yeah, she thought you might not know. The other thing is,” Clint said, his expression growing ominous, “I caught enough of the conversation to know Barnes is with the Hunt—that means he’s under some kind of spell, right? And they won’t be able to sustain that on a Seelie for long. Back on Earth, we’re coming up on the Hunter’s Moon. If they’re planning to hold onto him just long enough to make him into a harvest sacrifice… Well, saying you’re running out of time is an understatement.”

“First things first,” Peggy said briskly, because Steve looked like if she didn’t do something, he might start punching trees until Hydra fell out. “Does S.H.I.E.L.D. know you’re here, Agent Barton?”

“Are you kidding? I volunteered to go find a bunch of genocidal lunatics who’ve got what I hope to God is only temporary control of the Wild Hunt and stop them from getting a massive power boost the next time the moon’s dark. They couldn’t send me fast enough. I expected to run this as a solo mission, but, hey, I’m really damn happy to defer to a higher-ranked agent if you’re cooking up a plan.”

“It will certainly be easier with some support,” Peggy said. “How much of that good luck can you muster between now and sunset tomorrow?”

“If these were normal circumstances, I’d say I already had plenty. I burned a little of my stockpile catching up to you, but I think you’ve made it up with these bruises, which, _ow,_ by the way. But facing the Wild Hunt ain’t exactly a walk in the park. At full capacity, they can cut through an army, and we’ll have to figure out how to hold them off long enough to break the spell on Barnes with just three of us.” He glanced at Steve. “He really doesn’t remember you at all?”

Steve clenched his jaw again, grimly, and Peggy had never been more proud of him, or more afraid for him, than when he looked Clint in the eye and said, with certainty, “He will.”

 

Peggy and Clint spent half of the night and most of the next morning proposing plans that were sensible, strategic, and by-the-book for the situation. Steve spent the night poking holes in them and waiting for them to get tired of arguing, because he knew in his gut what had to happen, and in the end Peggy was forced to agree. “I don’t like it,” she told him, when they parted ways late in the afternoon, “but I’m going along with this because you’re right: we don’t have a better choice. I need you to at least acknowledge how completely mad this is, though.”

“Of course it is,” Steve said, giving her a thin smile. “We’re through the looking glass, aren’t we? We’re all mad here.”

Peggy looked at him as if there was more she wanted to say, but in the end, she just put her arms around him and held him tightly for just a little longer than she should have. “Be careful, darling,” she said, when she pulled away.

“No promises,” he said, like he always did, and she huffed at him and left to take up her position.

Clint was stationed down the road from Steve, up on the hill where he could shoot from relative cover (“Probably sitting in the only patch of poison ivy in Faerie,” he’d muttered as he settled in), and Peggy was just past him, leaving him within earshot of her but not sight. The arrangement left him both isolated and exposed in his position on the bridge, and since he wasn’t lucky enough to belong to a shadowy government organization, the closest thing he had to protective gear was Bucky’s sealskin wrapped around his shoulders. He wasn’t complaining; he’d asked for this—but the first time he’d done it, he hadn’t had time to think. This time, he’d had plenty of time to consider exactly how much this was going to hurt.

He was going to do it anyway, obviously. If it was a little pain now or living without Bucky, he’d happily take the pain. He was more worried about the fact that if he screwed up the first try, he wouldn’t get a second.

“They’re moving,” said Clint, through the little communicator earbuds—S.H.I.E.L.D. tech, not much more than a glorified radio signal, but a whole lot better than nothing, which was what Peggy promised him they’d get if they tried any more sophisticated listening devices inside Faerie. “Good eye, Carter. Thirteen of them, just like you said.” There was a sound that Steve only recognized as the twang of a bowstring afterward, when Clint said, “Make it twelve. Okay, you ugly bastards, get ready to have eleven.”

Steve didn’t have to rely on the earbuds when the second horse went down. The riders themselves were supposed to be just about indestructible when they were in motion, and they were heavily armored enough that traditional iron weapons were probably useless, but the mounts weren’t armored at all, and Clint had brought iron-tipped arrows. He could hear the horse’s death scream just fine without the earbuds; in fact, he imagined he might hear that sound in nightmares for the rest of his life. It was necessary, and the horses were probably being just as badly mistreated as their riders, or worse, but it was ugly, and he flinched when he heard the bowstring sound again, popping several times in rapid succession, and a series of shrieks and crashes. “Ten-nine-eight-seven-six,” Clint said, with satisfaction. “Let’s hope your theory’s right and the riders who get unhorsed turn around and head back to the barn, Carter, because the rest are out of range now, and they’re headed straight toward you.”

“I’m ready,” Peggy said, and then Steve saw them.

This time around, he picked out Bucky right away; the bright metal arm was a beacon among all the leather and bone. But it looked like the riders hadn’t even considered stopping for their lost members; if anything, they seemed to be spurring the horses on faster. Steve’s stomach churned. “They’re not slowing down,” he warned Peggy.

“Don’t worry about me! Worry about your own job,” she shouted back, but he ran to the other side of the bridge anyway, watching with horror as half a dozen horses and riders thundered toward Peggy, who was standing directly in their path with no defense other than one small pistol. She’d assured him that the steel-jacketed bullets would be nearly as effective against fae as pure iron, but a charging horse could still run her down between her gun firing and the time it took the rider to fall. He was suddenly terribly sure that they’d all miscalculated, that his best friend was about to be crushed under the hooves of the Hunt and there was going to be nothing he could do about it but watch.

Then the antlered leader reached the line of iron filings Peggy had poured across the road.

The horse reared, bucking wildly, eyes so wide that Steve could see a ring of white all the way around the pupils. It was a miracle, Steve thought, that the rider wasn’t thrown. Then Peggy started firing. At this speed, she could take aim at the riders, and she did, unerringly, firing into exposed chinks in armor and gaps in helmets as each one stopped and wheeled upon reaching the barrier. Seven shots from the pistol and she’d felled four of them, bodies scattering across the road, and Steve didn’t see what happened with the fifth, the leader, because the sixth was Bucky, coming under the bridge.

Steve braced himself, took a deep breath, and threw himself over the ledge.

 

Peggy was under no illusions that she could actually kill any members of the Wild Hunt. The fae (and occasional unfortunate humans) who joined the Hunt came and went for various reasons, but while on a ride, they were almost functionally immortal. The best she could hope to do was take them out of commission for a night; at sunrise they’d revive, and crawl back to whatever hole they’d come from to rest and heal through the daylight hours, and the next night they’d ride out again, ready to tear the world open to get vengeance. But their power in the mortal world was limited, and Peggy could protect her team— _if_ they could get out of Faerie between now and then. _If_ all three of them survived the current encounter.

Between herself and Barton, they’d neutralized all of the threats but the leader, who was always the strongest and most merciless of the riders. He was still stalled at the line of iron filings, and his mount was shrieking with animal terror, unable to turn back for fear of the rider’s long black whip, unable to move forward for the iron. Peggy knew she’d never have a better shot than this; that if she could just take the leader down here, she could go and help Steve, who was undoubtedly fighting Barnes for all he was worth and still getting the worst of it.

She also knew that she only had one bullet left, and to disable the rider, the steel would have to pierce flesh that was protected by layers of black armor that looked suspiciously like dragon hide, or worse. So she waited, in the stance she’d trained on the firing range until it was pure muscle memory: arms braced in front of her and holding the pistol in a hand-over-hand grip, feet planted and knees bent to compensate for the weight of both her MI-13 gear and the baby under the iron-laced Kevlar. She held her ground while the rider, seeing the uselessness of spurring his mount forward, swung his leg over the saddle and dismounted, striding toward her. He stopped when he came to the barrier, and then he set his boot squarely in the line of iron shavings.

A burst of flame blazed up, flames licking up his boots almost to the knee, and the rider held his position, waiting patiently until the fire fizzled and died out. Whether he couldn’t feel the pain or it simply didn’t faze him, he scraped his boot across the filings, breaking the line, and the protection spell she’d quietly woven in along with it. He drew the sword he wore at his side as he stepped forward, and the blade ignited, too, as it came free of the sheath. She stood her ground, watching closely, because there were certain ways Fae fighters tended to move that might, if she was very lucky, reveal a chink in the armor, an inch of bared flesh where she could shoot and be sure the bullet would strike home. If she wasn’t lucky, well, she’d just have to wait until she could see the whites of his eyes.

And then the rider stopped, and stood for a long moment, before he reached up, lifted the massive antlered helmet, and dropped it by the side of the road. “Peggy?” he said.

Peggy had been expecting a monster. She hadn’t been expecting a young man with brown hair, distressingly ordinary features, and eyes that were fading from blazing red to an unmistakably human shade of hazel. It took her several minutes to swallow the lump in her throat enough to say, “Hello, Michael.”

 

Steve crashed into Bucky from above, making up his lack of weight with momentum, and the force was enough to carry Bucky off the horse and down to the roadway, where Steve landed on top of him. Bucky stared at him with wide, wild eyes, and Steve struggled, trying to hold him down. The mask was gone today, but the strange bone-and-leather armor made him look very alien.

“You shouldn’t be here, human,” Bucky spat, and something inside Steve went cold.

“You know me, Buck,” he said, catching Bucky’s metal wrist and trying to shove it to the hard-packed ground.

“No I _don’t,”_ Bucky said, and threw Steve off him. Steve hit the ground, striking his head on the cobblestones, and pushed himself up, dazed. Bucky was walking toward him; his vision was doubling and tripling, blurring him in and out of focus as he moved, but he saw Bucky raise the metal left arm, and he rolled to the side as Bucky’s fist came down on the stones. Jesus, Bucky wasn’t just trying to warn him off, he was trying to _kill_ him.

“Your name…. is James... Buchanan... Barnes,” he panted, staggering to his feet. “You’re a selkie. I’m your husband. For better or worse, as long as we both shall live.”

“Shut _up,”_ Bucky shouted at him, voice ragged and raw, and charged. Steve tried to sidestep, but not fast enough; Bucky caught him around the waist, driving him into the ground like he was making a football tackle. The metal arm came up, and came down, and for the first moment, the pain didn’t even register; then it blazed into his consciousness, and the only reason he _didn’t_ wonder if he was dying was that he was pretty sure dying couldn’t possibly hurt this much. There was some kind of magic in the metal fist that had sent a shockwave all the way through him, meant to disable, or to stun.

Joke was on them. Steve had been getting the crap kicked out of him since he was a mouthy kid on a Brooklyn schoolyard. He knew how to take a goddamn _punch._

It took him a moment to get to his feet again, bracing himself the whole time for a blow that never came. Bucky had taken a few steps back and was watching him, looking stunned that Steve was trying to stand up at all. “Stay down,” he hissed, bringing the metal fist up again, and Steve grinned crookedly at him, feeling blood trickle down from his split lower lip.

“I can do this all day,” he said.

Bucky came at him then, wild, either surprised or infuriated into an all-out attack, and Steve would probably have been dead if he’d tried to avoid it. He didn’t sidestep, though, and he didn’t run. Instead, he ducked under the gleaming metal fist, swung the sealskin off his shoulders, and threw it around Bucky’s waist.

“Remember,” he said, “your heart belongs to me,” and then the magic flung them both backward, filling the world with light like the sun on ocean waves.

 

“How long has it been, outside?” Michael said, and his voice sounded eager, almost hungry.

Peggy couldn’t answer, because she couldn’t speak. How long had she spent searching for her brother, insisting that she was telling the truth about how the fairies had come and carried him away? In the first few months after his disappearance, the memory had blurred, become less certain with every grilling from her parents and the police and the therapists all determined to catch her in a contradiction, until even she no longer knew whether the memory was real, or just a story her elastic young mind had created to defend itself against some far more traumatic event. She hadn’t completely understood what was happening until years later, when she read a study about interrogations and the power of suggestion; as an adult, reading over the old police reports, she’d been able to see how the very people who should have been looking for answers had, instead, closed themselves off to the messy, sticky possibilities of a fae abduction because _that just didn’t happen anymore,_ leading her to revise and distrust her own memories.

If MI-13 had gotten hold of her in those first few days, or S.H.I.E.L.D., instead of the overworked and unimaginative Aylesbury PD, would they have taken her story more seriously? Would they have investigated, maybe even realized earlier that Hydra had moved from a whispered rumor to an actual threat? It was pointless to wonder; she’d never know what might have been. But if Michael had really been with the Wild Hunt all this time, a changeling child who’d forgotten everything until he saw her again, then she still had a chance for vindication. And more than that, she still had a chance to bring him home.

“Peggy,” he said, holding out his hand in its bone-and-leather gauntlet, and in spite of everything she knew about faerie tricks and faerie traps, she found herself reaching for it.

And then Molly the corgi flew out of nowhere, a small flat body that hurtled into Peggy’s knees and knocked her backward, overbalancing her unaccustomed weight so that she fell right down on her arse. When she looked again, Michael’s face had vanished, and in its place was a misshapen red skull, the skin and features burned away, only horror remaining. The Rider’s sword was flashing all around the little dog, but she was managing to be everywhere and nowhere at once, darting in to slash at the Rider’s shins with her teeth before zipping away again. She ran between his legs, twisting her long body around his ankles and chomping down hard, lips pulled back from long canine teeth. The Rider was so busy trying to attack her without hitting himself with the sword, and at the same time keep his balance, that he didn’t even notice Peggy carefully getting back to her feet and moving toward him with slow, inexorable determination.

“I’m sorry, Michael,” she said, and shot him right between the eyes.

In the sudden silence that followed the gunshot, Peggy watched the Rider crumple to the ground and waited for a long moment to see if he got up again. When he didn’t, she turned away from the body and looked around until she spotted Molly’s long, stumpy-legged shape lying by the side of the road. The little corgi’s furry flanks were heaving, her tongue lolling out of her mouth, the picture of canine exhaustion. As Peggy approached her, she rolled over and stood up, jerkily, limping on one hind paw. Then she shook herself, walked up to Peggy, turned her back, and slowly and deliberately sat her furry behind down on the toes of Peggy’s MI-13 issue steel-toed combat boots.

Peggy started to laugh, and only stopped when she heard Steve calling her name.

 

By the time Peggy and Clint arrived, Steve had gotten his hands under Bucky’s armpits, dragged him to the grass by the side of the road, and stripped him of as much of the bolted and buckled armor as he could. The metal arm was connected in some way he couldn’t quite figure out, and he was trying to get it off, but all he’d managed to do so far was bloody his fingers. “He won’t wake up,” he called out to them. “I have to get this thing off him. Got any ideas?”

“I’ll give it a shot,” Clint said, kneeling beside Bucky, which left Steve with nothing else to do but lay Bucky’s head on his lap and settle in for the long haul. “Got it,” Clint announced a moment later, and the arm dropped away. “Hey, Carter, you ever see anything like this before?”

“I’m afraid I have, Agent Barton,” said Peggy, bending down and brushing her fingers over the star-shaped brand seared into Bucky’s flesh just below the shoulder. “They connected the arm to him with some kind of dark magic spell, I’m guessing. Those can be rather brutal, and the best-case scenario is that he won’t remember most of it. I’m sure it will be quite traumatic, all the same. It’s going to be a long road for him to get back to where he was before, Steve,” she said gently. “If he ever manages that at all.”

“I don’t care. I’ll do whatever it takes to help him,” Steve said. “I just need him to _wake up.”_  He tucked the sealskin more securely around Bucky. “There has to be something we can do. We should take him to a hospital, or… or a sorcerer or something. They have those here, right?”

“Hospitals, no; sorcerers, maybe,” Clint said, “but, buddy, I think you’re going about this the wrong way. The Wild Hunt had some kind of a spell on him, and you broke it, right? Usually, if something weird happens right after that, it’s a failsafe on the original spell kicking in. Which means you’ve gotta do this spellbreaking style.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Steve said, his eyes fixed on Bucky’s face, which was too white and unnaturally still.

Clint sighed. “Look,” he said, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for a long time. The night the two of you met, both of you probably thought it was bad luck that you bumped into his chair and knocked the sealskin off, right? But, see, it wasn’t. The thing I didn’t tell you—and please don’t tell Nat about me telling you now, because she’ll yell at me for saying anything at all—is that I didn’t have my bad-luck field going that day.”

“Nobody blames you, Clint,” Steve said, distracted, but Clint shook his head.

“Steve, listen to me,” he said. “The way I know I didn’t accidentally put a bad-luck whammy on you is that I was putting a _good_ -luck whammy on you. When things seemed like they went sideways anyway, I couldn’t figure it out. But later on, I realized, there are times when I try to dick around with somebody’s luck, and it’s like the whole universe is pushing back against me. When the thing I’m asking for is so unlikely, it’s like reality itself resists making it happen. That night was the first time I’ve ever had it go the other way. When I tried to give you two a nudge, I think what I actually did was let you skip some steps and move you toward what was supposed to happen anyway.”

“What are you saying, Clint?”

“Oh, you ridiculous, oblivious man,” Peggy finally burst out, losing patience. “He’s telling you that the way to break a curse is with true love’s kiss.”

“What?” Steve looked back and forth between them. Both of them were looking at him expectantly, and he felt his cheeks blaze red. “I… what?”

“What are you waiting for, a crab with a Jamaican accent to sing you a song about it? Kiss him, Steve,” Clint said.

“Okay, fine,” Steve said. “Turn your backs.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Clint glanced at Peggy. “He’s kidding, right?”

“Look, public displays of affection make some people very uncomfortable,” said Steve.

“And what has this entire rescue been, if not a blatant display of your love for your husband? Agent Barton is right, darling,” said Peggy. “Shut up and kiss the man already.”

“Okay, okay,” Steve said. Even under these circumstances, it just felt weird kissing somebody who was unconscious—and he wasn’t exactly anybody’s Prince Charming. But he bent down over Bucky, closed his eyes, and pressed his lips against Bucky’s.

He wasn’t sure exactly when Bucky started to return the kiss. It was so slow, so faint, that Bucky might as well not be stirring at all. But once Bucky’s right hand came up to caress Steve’s cheek, it was unmistakable. Steve opened his eyes and found Bucky’s ocean-colored eyes looking back at him, full of recognition, and love, and everything that went along with it. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” said Bucky. “What’s going on? Did I pass out or something?”

“Kind of,” Steve said. “Give it a minute and see if anything comes back to—” He stopped when he realized that the surface under his knees had gone from snowy ground to carpeted floor, and the surroundings had gone from a forest under an unfamiliar sun to the living room of Bucky’s brownstone, complete with his mother’s framed watercolor paintings on the walls. “How did we get back?” he demanded.

“Bucky has a very good dog,” Peggy informed him, just before Molly came scrambling across the floor and leapt onto Bucky’s stomach, knocking the breath out of him. His expression was so startled and offended—and so patently _Bucky_ —that Steve cracked up, while Bucky gave the dog a one-handed shove and tried vainly to sit up before she tackled him again.

“Aw, shit,” Clint said, over the noise of Steve and Peggy laughing together while Bucky cursed and scrambled to stop Molly from slobbering all over his face. “S.H.I.E.L.D.’s gonna be so fucking pissed that I left my brand new compound bow in Fairyland.”


	4. Chapter 4

Iceland was the weirdest and most beautiful place Steve had ever seen, and that included the time he’d spent in Faerie. In fact, after he got a look at the impossibly steep lichen-covered mountains and black sand beaches, it was hard to believe that he and Bucky hadn’t accidentally wandered back in. This was a place where two continents were literally being ripped apart on a geological time scale, a land of weird extremes and wild, dangerous beauty: the kind of place where magic wasn’t something you occasionally heard about happening to your friend’s cousin but an everyday fact of life, where it would be completely unsurprising to turn a corner and walk into a gathering of elves or trolls or giants.

Not that he needed more legendary creatures in his life. He was happy with just one.

Bucky heaved his seal body out of the water onto the sand—not the famous black sand today, which had turned out to be pebbly and rough, but the soft brown sand of the beach at Álftanes. He waved his single flipper at Steve, and Steve said, “Hang on,” and raised the camera. Seals weren’t exactly suited to saying cheese and smiling, but Bucky lifted his tail and arched his head back, posing, before rolling over and stretching out on his side.

“Yes, yes, you’re a very attractive fur sausage,” Steve told him, pausing every few steps to snap a photo of another pose while he carried Bucky’s clothes toward the edge of the water. “I’ve taken like three hundred photos of you just today, though, so maybe you could let me save a little of the memory card for, you know, Iceland? Or at least some pictures of us together when you have your human face on. I mean, this is supposed to be our honeymoon.”

Bucky spat water at him, but Steve had long since gotten wise to that trick. He stepped back, dodging the spray, and said, “You’re only gonna get your own clothes wet if you do that. Come on. We’ve been out here all day, I’m wearing three sweaters and I’m _still_ cold, and I’m assuming you’re gonna want to get back to the hotel and shower before dinner.”

Bucky let out an exaggerated sigh and turned back to give a long, low call before he wiggled a few feet further from the water’s edge. He stretched himself back into his human shape and stood up, with his sealskin wrapped around him. “We are gonna go on a real honeymoon, you know,” he said. “Just the two of us, without my baby sister tagging along.”

“You know not that much would’ve changed if we hadn’t brought her, right? There’s still no way in hell you could’ve convinced me to have sex on a beach anywhere, much less in Iceland. You were lucky you got what you got in the hotel room.”

“I know I was,” Bucky said, adjusting his new prosthetic—the Mark II, Tony called it, cutting edge and just recently made available to the general public—before slinging his right arm around Steve’s shoulders. “You specifically said you wanted to go someplace warm, though.”

“I said warm and exotic, with lots of water. Two out of three ain’t bad.” Steve left the bag with Emily’s clothes a safe distance from the tide line, then leaned into the shelter of Bucky’s sealskin while they waited. A moment later she came running up behind them, dressed but still barefoot and bubbling with excitement.

“That was great! That was so great,” she said, looping a ponytail holder around her wet hair. “We have to come back here. I want to come _live_ here.”

“Say that in January,” Steve told her, before he considered that she probably would say that in the middle of an ice storm that blotted out the only two hours of daylight. He had a funny feeling that they’d be back in a few years to visit her here, considering she was already begging Bucky to let her look into a study-abroad program she’d found at the Háskólinn á Bifröst. Winifred Barnes wasn’t likely to make any trouble about it, either; things hadn’t exactly gone well for her when she’d contested Bucky’s request for legal guardianship of Em, especially not once May Parker took the stand. After May’s testimony, Bucky had declared that whether or not Emily and Peter kept dating, the Parkers were welcome at all Barnes-Rogers family Thanksgivings thereafter.

Bucky hadn’t forgiven his mother, either, but they’d talked. Steve would have felt leery about that even if his heart hadn’t already been breaking for Bucky on account of what had been done to him in Faerie—Bucky had only let slip bits and pieces of what he remembered, but he still woke up two or three times a week panting and sweating, unsure what parts of the chaos in his head were nightmares and which were recovered memories of the Hunt. But Steve had held his tongue, for once, because Bucky was the one who had to live with it if he cut his mother off completely. And the conversation had gone okay—not well or easily, but okay; Bucky had made it clear that keeping her in his life wasn’t the same as forgiving her, and while she hadn’t gone so far as to apologize, at least she hadn’t said or done anything to make it worse. Bucky had, however, clearly specified that Winifred Barnes didn’t have an invitation to this year’s Barnes-Rogers family Thanksgiving.

“You ready for tomorrow?” he asked, while he and Bucky were packing up their beach gear and loading it into the car.

Bucky shook his head, long hair dripping saltwater onto the picnic basket. “I don’t know if it’s a thing you ever get ready for,” he said. “I wish there was anybody else who could do this for me. But there isn’t, so I’m just gonna have to be good enough.”

“You’re more than good enough,” Steve said. “You’re my husband. If you can survive that, you can survive anything.”

“Hmph,” Bucky said, but he bent his head down and kissed Steve, who started to lean into it and then jerked away.

“Gah! Emily wasn’t kidding about the fish breath,” he said. “That’s _horrible.”_

“No, it’s halibut,” Bucky said, and waited for Emily to groan.

“Just because you have legal custody of me doesn’t mean you have to make dad jokes, Bucky.”

“So you’re saying you’re tired of my jokes?”

“Yes!”

“Hi, Tired Of My Jokes, I’m—”

“If you finish that sentence I will leave you, permanent selkie marriage or not,” Steve said, and watched Bucky shake his head and laugh as he got into the driver’s seat.

Whatever happened tomorrow, he was planning on giving Bucky excuses to laugh like that for a long time. Like for the rest of their lives, maybe.

 

“Okay, tell me again how to pronounce where we’re going,” Steve said.

“Þingvellir,” said Bucky. “Where they hold the Althing.”

“And what’s the place where it is again?”

“Bláskógabyggð,” Bucky said, “and I’m pretty sure you’re trolling me, because you have no intention of ever trying to pronounce this stuff.”

“Yeah, but guys with accents are hot,” Steve said, earning a raised eyebrow from Bucky and a groan from Emily.

“And we’re here,” Bucky said, pulling the car into the parking lot and filing the accent thing away for later. “See the path going up that cliff over there?”

“We have to walk up that?”

“Yeah, sorry. We’re just gonna have to go slow and stop if you need your inhaler, ‘cause there’s no Fae with Disabilities Act to make the important stuff accessible.”

“So get on it, Mr. Hotshot Selkie Lawyer.”

“One thing at a time, Stevie. Jeez.”

Bucky _had_ passed the Bar, though. Had passed it kind of easily, in fact, and breezed out of the testing center with time to spare. Turned out that if there was a bright spot to getting abducted and temporarily magically brainwashed into a stone-cold killing machine, it was that it was a hell of a cure for test anxiety.

They did take it slow, Steve sticking close to him while Emily roamed ahead, stomping happily around the paths in her New Rock boots to look for the perfect selfie spot. Thank Maeve, his kid sister was getting a chance to be a kid again. It had taken her a while to recover, too, but he was pretty sure she was eventually going to be just fine.

Then they came around a curve in the path and walked into Faerie.

On earth, the path would only have brought them to Öxarárfoss, if it was possible to say “only” about a huge waterfall spilling over the massive stone cliff of a continental divide. Just like Grand Central, the same basic landmark existed in Faerie, but here, a platform the size of a throne room had been built in the middle of the river beneath the falls, and you got there by walking over a bridge that looked like it was made out of rainbows, because Asgardians were fucking showoffs. Everybody seemed to be arriving at the same time, but three figures were already seated on—yep, those were actual gold thrones in the middle of everything, because of course they were. Bucky had never seen any of them in person, but the first two were pretty damn unmistakable even if he hadn’t seen their profiles on the currency that occasionally circulated around the goblin markets: the old man with the eyepatch and the ravens on his shoulders, the young guy with the muscles and the long blonde braids and the hammer. When he saw the third one, he nudged Steve and said, “So that’s your art patron on the left there, huh?”

“Glad you picked up on the resemblance,” Steve said dryly. He’d spent weeks working on the portrait he’d owed Loki, which had made things a little cramped in the brownstone, because shortly after he sprung Bucky from the Wild Hunt, a ten-foot-tall stretched canvas had appeared in the kitchen, with a sticky note on it that said, “Use this.” They’d had no choice but to convert the dining room into a studio, and although the painting had vanished barely an hour after Steve put his signature on it and started speculating aloud about how he was supposed to deliver it to Asgard, Bucky very much doubted that he was ever getting the dining room back as such.

Oddly enough, that had also been about the time a weird number of people suddenly started expressing interest in the paintings Steve had hung up in local coffee shops. Steve kept saying he just wanted to break even on his art habit, but Bucky suspected he was going to have a nice profitable little sideline going before too long. (Bucky had only asked one of those surprise patrons where they’d seen Steve’s work, which was how he’d found out that Loki apparently liked their portrait enough to hang it in their bedroom, which gave rise to some other questions that Bucky had decided he really didn’t want answers to after all.)

He fixed his attention back on the proceedings when Odin called the court to order, because an Asgardian court of judgment was something he’d never actually expected to see in his lifetime. A whole pile of Hydra members had been rooted out and hauled in for various crimes ranging from abduction to high treason against Faerie, and there was no doubt this case was going to set a huge precedent in inter-realm law. Even so, it was a little disappointing how much of it was standard courtroom stuff. Odin had already gone over the evidence that had been delivered to him by the various Courts (and MI-13, and S.H.I.E.L.D., who didn’t _technically_ recognize his authority but weren’t interested in pissing him off, either), and he’d clearly made his decision to throw the whole batch of Hydra assholes into some hole too deep and dark for them ever to crawl back out of. “But first,” he said, “I understand one of the victims has asked to speak before the sentencing.”

That was Bucky’s cue. Steve squeezed his right hand, and he squeezed back and stood up, walking to the middle of the platform. “Allfather,” he said, bowing, making sure he was observing all the formalities. This was one courtroom speech he didn’t dare screw up. “I appreciate your agreeing to hear from me. You already know the details of what happened to me, and to my husband and my sister, and the other victims of the Wild Hunt. I know it’s traditional at this point to ask you to throw the book at the defendants. But that’s not why I asked for this chance to speak, because I’m confident that anyone who knowingly worked for Hydra will be punished accordingly.” If he made a point of glancing over at the line of defendants at the edge of the platform, and catching Brock Rumlow’s eye in particular, well, he figured he’d earned that one. “I want to tell you about a different injustice, the one that gave Hydra the opportunity to do what they did. I’m talking about selkie marriage.”

Odin blinked one eye at him, and Bucky was sure he’d terribly miscalculated this, that all he’d managed to do was mildly annoy the Allfather without even getting his point across. “Surely you could have taken that kind of grievance to the Seelie Court, instead of…” He looked around meaningfully. “This one.”

“Still, it might be interesting to hear what he has to say,” Loki said casually. “At least it adds a little variety to these dull proceedings. What?” they asked, when Thor looked at them sharply. “He’s very pleasant to look at. I don’t see why you’re all in such a hurry to stop.”

Odin looked like he would have had some sharp words for Loki if they’d been in private, but he clearly didn’t want to get into a family squabble right then. “Very well,” he said. “James Barnes may continue.”

Bucky nodded, hoping nobody else had heard the indignant noise Steve had made at Loki’s comment. “It’s no secret that selkies only have two kinds of magic, and they both revolve around our sealskins,” he said. “We can transform into seals, and anybody who takes our skins gets a certain amount of power over us. Sometimes we can steal it back, sometimes not. Sometimes people use that against us, the way Hydra did when they set up a situation where it looked like I’d defected to save my sister—and if my husband hadn’t rescued me, nobody in authority would ever have known the truth. I don’t know whether our magic started off as a blessing or a curse. In my case, it worked out. But just about every selkie lives in fear of getting their skin stolen until they’re married. Any number of selkies have argued that it’s unfair to us, and the Seelie Court has refused to do anything about it, but I’m not here to beg for sympathy about that. I’m here to point out that this gives people like Hydra leverage over us. As long as we can be controlled, as long as we can be desperate to get out of a bad marriage or constantly terrified about getting into one, we can be used, the way I was. And since you rule the Nine Realms, Allfather, a possible threat against the Seelie Court is a possible threat against Asgard, too.”

Odin’s expression was inscrutable. Maybe it was the one-eye thing, but Bucky couldn’t begin to guess what he was thinking. “No,” he finally said. “The spell is too strong. It can’t be broken.”

He was turning back to his throne to sit down again, presumably to announce his final judgment over the Hydra defendants, when Bucky took a deep breath and said, “No, Allfather, but could it be _changed?”_

Odin hesitated, but this time it was Thor who looked interested. “Go on,” he said.

“There’s something in fae law that we call a Merryweather clause,” Bucky said, emboldened. “There’s this story that both fae and human children learn—the humans, the Midgardians, they call it ‘Sleeping Beauty’—”

“We’re familiar,” Loki said.

“Well. The human version gets a lot of things wrong, from our perspective, but it does get one thing right. In the story, after the princess gets cursed, she’s supposed to die on her sixteenth birthday, but some fae were able to give her an escape clause. She fell asleep instead, which accomplished the curse symbolically, but it basically suspended her death sentence and gave her a condition that would break it.”

Odin was looking hard at him now, and Thor was looking thoughtful, while Loki looked so uninterested that Bucky secretly suspected they were overcompensating. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

“I’m asking Asgard to give selkies an escape clause. Give us a condition so that, if we accidentally get married, or if we’re forced into it, we have a way to get out. It doesn’t have to be easy. It doesn’t have to be sleeping for a hundred years either,” he said quickly, “but having _something_ would make a lot of us a lot less desperate, and that would make it a lot harder for people like Hydra to exploit us in the same way again.”

Odin looked thoughtful. Bucky suspected he’d already made a decision about this, too, and the whole consideration thing was just for show; he was the god of wisdom, after all, he probably didn’t need time to sit around debating the idea. Bucky had either won or lost already, and all he could do was wait.

“I suppose,” Loki said suddenly, “that if marriage is a contract, one _could_ add a condition that would invalidate its terms. Say, for example, if the marriage is never consummated.”

Odin blinked his single eye. “Go on,” he said.

“A condition, tacked onto the spell, exactly like our friend here proposed,” Loki continued, without stirring from their throne. “If the selkie and their spouse are married by entrapment or misadventure, they can annul the contract by deciding not to… what is that charming human expression? Oh, yes: they can decide not to bone.”

Yeah, that was definitely Steve who Bucky could hear in the audience, having a sudden coughing fit. He was kind of struggling to keep his cool himself. “That kind of deal only works if it’s consensual on both sides,” he said, aware that he was laying down conditions in front of three separate gods. “And a contract needs a time limit. Specific and enforceable. Say, um, a year and a day? That’s pretty standard terms in fae law.”

Odin was glaring at Loki through his lone eye, but once again, he clearly didn’t want to have it out with his kid in front of an audience. “Loki speaks wisdom,” he said, his tone clearly indicating how astonishing he found that fact. “It will be done. Does the young selkie have anything else to add, or shall we proceed with the sentencing?”

Bucky wasn’t easily cowed by many things these days, but semi-immortal god-kings from space _were_ still on the list. “That sounds very satisfactory. Thank you for hearing me out, Allfather,” he said, which seemed to pacify Odin a little. Sure, he was symbolically putting himself in Odin’s debt, but it wasn’t like he could’ve declined anything the High Court of Asgard asked him to do, anyway, so he could take this one for the team. He went back to his seat, and Steve reached out for his hand again while they sat and waited for justice to be done.

 

Thor waited until everyone else had filed out of Öxarárfoss, leaving him and his sibling completely alone, before he turned to them and asked, “And how much of this exactly were you responsible for, Loki?”

“My dear brother,” Loki said, “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, I think you do,” said Thor. “You always know a little more than you say. And there are just a few things about this story that don’t make sense, such as exactly how you ended up with the selkie James Barnes’s sealskin when none of the Unseelie seems to remember giving it to you. So what was it about that particular selkie and that particular human that made you so eager to intervene?”

“What are you saying, Brother? That I set this up? Ridiculous,” Loki said, waving their hand dismissively. “You know I don’t take any particular interest in either fae or humans. Anything strange about this story is simple coincidence, nothing more.”

Thor looked hard at them, but in the end he simply shook his head. “Heimdall, open the Bifrost,” he called, and Loki waited until Thor turned his back to smile.

“Nobody gets to ship-shame _me,_ brother,” they said, very quietly, before they stepped into the circle and let the bridge take them back to Asgard.

 

“I’m sorry I couldn’t figure out a way to fix it for you, too,” Bucky told Steve, as they walked down the street together. “I know you said you wanted to stay married—and after what you did for me in Faerie, it’d be pretty insulting to ask if you’re sure—but I would’ve liked to let you have the option, you know?”

“Buck,” Steve said, “it’s okay. You’re not responsible for what was done to any other selkies in the past, including yourself. But you did make things a lot better for selkies in the future. It would have been enough if you’d _only_ testified against Hydra and helped break up an organization that’s abducted and killed God knows how many people, and would’ve started a war among the fae Courts if they’d been left alone, but you didn’t even stop there. A lot of people who would have been trapped otherwise will get their freedom back because of you, not to mention that you faced down a god to do it.”

“I did kind of set a great legal precedent there,” Bucky said, allowing himself a little smile. “But I still wish I could’ve given you a _real_ choice.”

“Excuse me. James Barnes and Steven Rogers?”

Bucky turned. The person addressing him was an Icelandic woman with white-blonde hair and one of the heavy wool sweaters that were so popular here, and he was pretty sure he’d never seen her before in his life. “Yeah, that’s us,” he said.

“Good. I was asked to give you this.” She handed him an envelope. “A token of appreciation from a friend.”

“Okay,” Bucky said, puzzled, taking the envelope. The woman vanished down a side street as he opened it, and the papers inside dropped out of his suddenly numb right hand.

It was a divorce decree.

 

“What’s—” Steve bent down to pick up the papers, but Bucky was already running after the woman. “Hey,” he called, “hey, Icelandic lady, _hey,”_ and boy, _that_ didn’t get him any funny looks in the middle of Reykjavík or anything. By the time he gave up and turned back, Steve was leaning against a wall, scanning through the pages. “This can’t be real, can it?” he asked.

“At a glance, it looks real,” Bucky said, slumping against the bricks. “Did we piss off Loki? This sounds like Loki. I didn’t mean it, I shouldn’t have said I wished… I don’t even know what to think about this.”

“I do,” Steve said. “I hate it. It’s not even fair, we _did_ —you know, and it definitely hadn’t been a year and a day yet.”

“Yeah, I… I don’t know.” Bucky raked his hair back with both hands, an old habit he’d fallen back into since he got the new prosthetic. “Maybe this actually was supposed to be a gift. But if it was, I hate it and I want the receipt so I can take it back.”

“Then take off your coat and we’ll put it right,” Steve said.

“What? No. Steve, this is… it’s not what I wanted, but this is good for you. It means you’re _free.”_

“Giving you up isn’t freedom.”

“You’re not giving me up, you’re getting an _out._ If we just get married the human way, it means that if you’re ever unhappy, you have a choice to leave.”

“Jesus, Bucky, what do I have to do to convince you that’s not going to happen? I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t want to be selkie-married again, but you said you wanted to give me a choice. That means you have to let me choose you if I want to.”

“Steve,” Bucky said, “I just want you to take a minute, okay? For once in your life, just stop and think before you jump into something face-first.”

Steve gave him a long, disappointed look. “You’re gonna make me do this the hard way, aren’t you?”

“That assumes you’ve ever done anything the easy way in your entire—hey!” Bucky ran after Steve, who was walking purposefully toward one of the nearby buildings. He stopped short when he read the sign in the window and lost several seconds staring at it, so by the time he caught up, Steve was standing at the bar, talking to a local who seemed to be the owner of the place. The Icelander was showing him a list, and Steve pointed to an entry that made the guy laugh and nod, then pour out a shot of schnapps and slide it across the bar.

“Are you really gonna do this?” Bucky said, when he caught up. Steve had already downed the shot, which, considering he was a literal lightweight, was kind of horrifying. “I thought you said you wouldn’t sing karaoke for less than twenty-seven point eight million dollars.”

“Yeah, well, it turns out what I meant was, I’d either humiliate myself like this for twenty-seven point eight million dollars, or when I’m asking you to marry me. And at least I’m three thousand miles from Tony Stark while I’m doing it. Bucky, I’m doing this to show you that I don’t want to spend even one more day of my life not being married to you.” The owner was queueing up the music, and Steve turned and walked up the steps to the stage before Bucky recovered his powers of speech enough to stop him. He picked up the microphone and started to sing.

_“Ooh, you make me live… Whatever this world can give to me, it’s you, you're all I see—”_

“Oh my God,” Bucky said, and turned to the owner, who had already poured a shot for him without waiting to be asked.

“That’s your boyfriend?” he said, and gave Bucky a vaguely pitying look. “Já, he’s awful at this.”

“Yeah,” Bucky agreed, breaking into the biggest smile he’d ever worn in his life. “Wouldn’t change him for the world.”

Steve was, in fact, incredibly terrible at singing, and it was probably kind of cruel to both him and the other patrons in the bar to let him keep going. But he was doing it the way he did everything: throwing his whole heart and soul into it. And this time he was doing it for Bucky’s sake.

“You gonna marry him?” the bartender asked, and Bucky laughed.

“Yeah,” he said, “I think I am.” Then he turned his attention back to the stage to look at Steve, still trying gamely to pretend he wasn’t making a complete hash of the melody. The lyrics, however, were coming through just fine.

_“You’re my sunshine, and I want you to know that my feelings are true, I really love you… Ooh, you’re my best friend.”_

 

Bucky was initially worried that he might have to carry Steve back to the hotel, but Steve made it, stumbling over the threshold of their little room before he flopped face-first onto the bed. “I’m gonna be really sorry about this when we have to get up and get on a plane to JFK in the morning, aren’t I?” he mumbled, through a haze of exhaustion and Brennivín.

“Yeah, probably,” Bucky said, amused. “I’ve got a really great story about how you proposed to me, though. And by the way, just in case this wasn’t clear, yes, Steve Rogers, I will marry you, and yes, we can do a big church wedding if that’s what you want. I get dibs on Natasha for my best man, though.”

“I was gonna ask Peggy for mine,” Steve said.

“Yeah, we have to pick a time when she can get to Brooklyn. It’s stupid that I haven’t met her wife and neither of us has met the baby. And Molly Michelle Carter-Martinelli deserves a chance to meet her fairy dogmother. Hey, do you think we could train dog-Molly to be the ringbearer, or would she just, like, eat the little pillow that you tie the rings to?”

He was expecting a strong opinion about that, one way or the other, but Steve’s only response was a faint snore. Bucky shook his head, then resignedly started pulling Steve’s shoes off. He was going to stay up a little while longer, maybe update his fucking social media from “divorced” to “engaged” before everybody saw the status change and started freaking out. But before he did, he slipped off his sealskin and laid it over Steve like a blanket.

Steve could give it back to him in the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this fic, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it (at least, during the parts where I wasn't banging my head on the keyboard because WORDS, and/or crying, also because WORDS). 
> 
> Here are three pieces of bonus content that didn't make it into the fic. Credit and/or blame goes to Beradan for all three of them.
> 
> 1\. The joke that Clint will start his speech with when he is the MC at Steve and Bucky's human-style wedding reception:  
> "Sorry I was so late getting here today. I had car trouble. The guy at the repair shop said I blew a seal. I told him to fix my car and leave my personal life out of it."
> 
> 2\. A text that Bucky sends to Steve and Emily on a slow afternoon at the office:  
> "hey  
> if a selkie makes a rude gesture at someone else  
> are they  
> FLIPPERING THEM OFF?"  
> Neither of them texts him back.
> 
> 3\. A microfic, by Beradan, duplicated here with permission:  
>  **A Fae, showing up at Bucky’s front door:** Hello yes is this your husband please take him he ate a sandwich and now we can’t get rid of him  
>  **Steve, radiating innocence:** But EVERYONE SAYS if you eat food in the fae realm you can’t leave!  
>  **Bucky:** I don’t think it counts if you do it as an attack.  
>  **Steve:** You can’t prove anything.
> 
>  
> 
> I have a [fic Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/follow-the-sun-fanfic), a [random Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/lasrina), and a [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lasrina) if you want to join me in yelling about Captain America, corgis, and marine mammals in no particular order.
> 
> Love and baby seal squeaks,  
> follow_the_sun


End file.
